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DaedTech Digest: Goodbye, Frozen North, and Hello, Texas

Happy New Year, everyone!  I’ve gone quiet since post the last digest, a couple of weeks ago.  We managed to take some real time off, getting much needed R&R.

But that’s all over now, following New Years.  Not only are we back to work full time, but we’re also spending our evenings prepping to leave for the winter.  As I mentioned last time, we’re headed to Austin.  More specifically, we’re going to be staying on Lake Travis, at a nice, secluded property (at least, it looks that way from pictures).

As always, packing is an adventure.  But, unlike the first time I started journaling these trips, we’re not going somewhere for a month, and we’re not going somewhere that has predictable, chilly-ish weather.  Here’s what we’re doing instead:

  • Going away for 3-4 months instead of 1.
  • Not entirely sure where we’ll be after the first month.
  • Packing for weather that, over the course of 4 months, could range from “chilly at night” to “deathly hot desert.”

This means that we’ll probably pack more.  But, counter-intuitively, probably not that much more.

In terms of hauling the cats around or our work setups and electronics 1 vs. 3-4 months really doesn’t matter.  And, clothing-wise, we’re only ever really looking for 1-2 weeks’ worth of stuff before doing laundry.  It’s just that in this case, we need 1-2 weeks worth of pants and long sleeve shirts as well as shorts and t-shirts.  And that doesn’t account for a ton of variability in our approach.

So, wish us luck on our travels.  It’s been fun, after a fashion, here in frozen Michigan, but I’m ready to put scenes like this in the rearview mirror.

Picks

  • Here’s a simple pick for you, and one that those of you with New Years resolutions about productivity might appreciate.  This site, tomato-timer.com, is a dead simple way to implement the pomodoro technique.
  • Amanda and I have been watching this show called Black Mirror lately, which is a series about the near-ish term future.  It’s sort of Twighlight Zone meets sci-fi, and it’s as compelling as it is dark.  (I also suggest watching beyond the pilot, which isn’t really representative of the rest of the show.)
  • And, finally, speaking of Amanda, she got me this activity/fitness tracker for Christmas: the Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music.  I’d found Fitbit to be increasingly annoying (especially the mobile app and the fact that you needed a data connection to see how many steps you had), and this is an awesome replacement.  The app is a nice user experience, and it provides an immense amount of data, which I find very cool.

The Digest

The digest is a little light this week, since I was on vacation and not producing content the last couple of weeks.

  • Here’s our last video from Vermont, in which we talked about how we, as small business owners, handle things that employers usually take care of, like sick days and health insurance.
  • And, here’s a Q&A mailbag that we filmed upon returning home from Vermont.

As always, have yourselves a great weekend.

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David Falkner
5 years ago

Just as a minor aside, my wife’s work got us a kind of high-end Bluetooth speaker (“Ultimate Ears Boom 3”), a cylinder maybe 3×8 inches in size and weighing maybe 2-3 lbs. Living out of luggage, my initial thought was that we needed it like a hole in the head. But the first time we sat down to work and fired it up, I realized it was going to be well worth lugging around. We enjoy listening to music all day as we work, and we have been using laptop speakers for our work music for the past year. Huge… Read more »