First day of 2019 status:

Cleaning my home office/studio and listening to moody progressive house.

Yep, life is good. 😆👍

Today’s the first day I’m wearing my new glasses (old ones broke!) while working on the computer…and it’s actually rather sunny out. The full effect is:

Major Happy Mood Time! 🤩

(which is a blessing because having to wear my prescription sunglasses everywhere, even indoors, was really making me feel depressed. So glad I can see normally once more!)

I don’t have time to do a whole write up, so here’s the gist of it: since I’m no longer using #Facebook to share family photos, I wanted to find a way to create a password-protected photo gallery. After some research, I tried out SmugMug. It works great! For only a few dollars a month, I can upload and present photos far more beautifully than I ever could on social media, it’s secure, and it’s ad-free. Simply perfect and just in time for the holidays. Now I can email or text the link & password to family and friends, and we’re off to the races. 👍
#openweb #lifehacks

Now I know why The Martian movie was made. I finally got around to reading the original book, and holy cow is this a fun read. Not to mention very cinematic (almost like reading a screenplay). Can’t wait to watch the movie once again! #movies #scifi

My 36th birthday is coming up this month, and something I’ve been wanting to do for years is promote a fundraising campaign for charity: water. So that’s exactly what I’m doing! Your donation will directly help bring clean drinking water to communities around the world. 🙏🏻💜

Rewatched Blade Runner 2049 again last night…I hadn’t seen it since my first viewing in the theater (which was quite the experience). Good God I love this movie. As expected I picked up on a number of things during this subsequent viewing I hadn’t before. Of most interest to me are the biblical themes…for example, Officer K at the end is a type of Jesus figure. I’ll have to write more in a spoiler review some time! (Also, I enjoyed the movie soundtrack even more this time around…so-o-o good.) #scifi #movies

I’ll be posting more on this soon, but basically we spent Thanksgiving Eve and the next morning rearranging everything at our house so we have a real bedroom converted into an office/studio/art space for me and my wife to share. Feeling super stoked today!

In a recent Essential Life video, I proposed an essentialism challenge where you pick a top goal for focus on for a week. For myself, I picked doing some pushups every night before bed. That went pretty well, so now I’ve decided to continue building on that habit. For the next few weeks I’m going to try doing one more pushup each night than the night before and see how far I get. Currently I’m only up to 16 which isn’t much, so hopefully I have some headroom. Maybe you’ll get to see a before/after photo eventually. 💪🏻
#lifehacks

I finally got around to watching the much-hyped Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. Actually I binge-watched all six episodes because it was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen in my life. Wow! I have so many thoughts on so many levels. Might need to write a longer essay soon once I’ve processed it more. (Personal aside: not many people know this, but prior to getting married, both my wife and I were in religous cults…no, not the same ones! So any time I watch a documentary about any sort of cult, it hits home hard.) #tvshows

Stan Lee has died today. 95 years old. I never got into comic books at a kid, and for whatever reason, I’m still not a consumer of that medium—however, I’m absolutely hooked on comic book-based movies and TV shows. I love all the MCU movies, especially over the last four years. I love the Marvel shows on Netflix. I love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (I also love all the “Arrowverse” DC-based shows on The CW.) So the news of Stan’s passing hits me hard. What an incredible legacy of storytelling he leaves with us. #scifi #movies #tvshows

I’ve decided (for the umpteenth time!) to resume daily microblogging. The plan is to post to my website once a day and syndicate to Twitter and Mastodon. I’ve really been enjoying other daily bloggers such as Seth Godin and Dave Winer for a while now, plus the folks I follow on Twitter who essentially use that platform for blogging. To aid me in this quest, I’m using Things to remind me every day at 11am Pacific to post something. We’ll see how it goes. 😃
#website #writing

📺 2018 iPad Pro, Pencil 2, Mac mini // Hands-on Details

Some impressions on Apple’s October product lineup:

• MacBook Air: 😐
• Mac mini: 😃
• iPad Pro: 🤩

#Apple #iPadPro

The good part about joining a gym that has a café area is I can bring my laptop here and get work done.

The bad part is now I’m sitting in a chair working on my computer, and I’m at a freakin’ gym! 🧐🤨😭

There’s a lot of really bad religion out there. Social media makes this seem even more outrageous. Here are a couple of clues to help sort things out:

Does your faith compel you to become more compassionate towards others, or more embittered?

Do you regularly shake your head as you worry about those (X) people groups doing (Y), or do you see each person as a unique individual human worthy of respect?

#spirituality

Megan Westra recently asked an interesting question on Twitter: “what have you done in the last year to decenter and/or deconstruct whiteness in your life?” I appreciated her question and answered it thusly:

I’ve come to admit my white privilege. I used to recoil at the idea, thinking if I hadn’t personally committed any overt racist acts, I was not a racist and thus not to blame for anything. I’ve since come to realize I have a reponsibility to fight back against systemic racism.

If I’d had more room in my tweet, I would have admitted I’m not sure what the most effective way is for me fight against racism and #bigotry, but I do know I’ve started by examining my own actions. I intentionally try to go out of my way to listen to and respect the voices and art of people of color, and I encourage their promotion in all fields of endeavor. And if I’m ever given any authority to recommend candidates for a team, panel, conference, whatever…I intend to put in a lot of effort to find people from the margins to make sure they get first dibs. This doesn’t make me a great person. It just means I’ve grown a little bit more aware than some of my white peers, for which I am grateful.