DaedTech

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.

DaedTech Digest: So Long, Austin, and Thanks for All the Wildlife

For the last… 7, weeks, I think… we’ve been in Austin, Texas.  In that time, I’ve settled into answering slow travel questions in the digests except for last week, when I described killing a scorpion.

Now, though, I’m going back to a little journal blogging.  We’re on the move again because our lease is up.  But we’ve had a great time in Austin (technically, unincorporated Hudson Bend, on Lake Travis, but with an Austin mailing address).  In no particular order, here are some things we’ve done.

• Went on a Taco Tour of Austin.
• Traveled a few hours to San Antonio, where we toured the Riverwalk.
• Hiked through a lot of parks and forest preserves.
• Walked all over and around downtown Austin.
• Ate a lot of breakfast tacos.

I’m not sure whether or not we did our part to “keep Austin weird.”  But I do feel as though we got a nice taste of life here, and that we enjoyed it.

But the thing I might miss most about staying in this fun house, near a lake, and in the woods, is the wildlife (scorpions notwithstanding).  From our balcony, we have seen an armadillo, a huge owl, a bunch of bats, a skunk, buzzards, hawks, a fox, miscellaneous dogs and cats, and a family of deer that lives in our back yard here.

As I’ve said before, I love doing the tourist thing.  But sometimes, the best part of a place we stay can be the ambiance and general vibe as you sit around reading or working.

In a nod to that idea, here’s a shot of a doe looking at me calmly from about 20 feet away, out of our kitchen window.

Picks

• I picked this in the Freelancers Show episode that we just recorded, so I’ll pick this again.  I’ve been actively consuming Youtube channels to learn more about the medium, and I really like this guy, Jarvis.  It’s a mix of programmer topics and other stuff (he was, for a while, I guess, a programmer at Google).
• Speaking of Youtube, if you’re looking to get going there, this tool, TubeBuddy, can help you navigate best practices and channel optimization.
• I’ve been reading this book, The Runelords, lately.  If you like fantasy/sci-fi, it’s an interesting fantasy story, with a really unique system of magic.  Imagine a world where you could confer your strength or your smarts or your sight onto another person, to make them twice as effective at each, respectively.  Now, imagine the political ramifications of such a thing being possible.  It makes for a fascinating book and world.
• Oh, and if you want to go on the Austin Taco Tour, you should totally do that.

The Digest

• On a relatively recent Facebook Live, Amanda and I broadcast from a scenic spot and talked about what we read, listen to, and watch.
• Here’s a new episode of the Freelancers Show, where the other panelists and I discussed how to raise prices on existing clients.
• And, finally, here’s the latest in my “Time to Joy” series on Youtube, where I record my journey from finding a tool to having it installed and being useful for me.  This episode’s subject?  CodeRush.  Watch to see how long it took me to go from zero to joy with CodeRush.

And, as always, have yourselves a great weekend.