finite speck

I'm very thankful these days for YouTube as a way for people to share knowledge. I feel guilty that I've never created a YouTube video to do the same for the many different people of all ages and backgrounds that I've gained knowledge from on how to fix things or for the best settings for a camera or for do-it-yourself projects. I hope this never goes away, but who knows how long things like this will last. I've spent a decent amount of time this past week researching GoPro cameras and settings for shooting video on them as well as DJI equipment. I know I'll also be reviewing things for my DSLR camera too as I plan to do a lot of shooting photos and video this next week during our reno and of the final product.  I'm hoping to get some unique video of timelapse, drone, water, etc to set our new place apart from the thousands of places that are similar to it in Gulf Shores. We just have a ton of competition in the 3 bedroom space. Here we go.

What makes a day a good day? What makes a day a bad day? Yesterday I had a good day and my wife had a rough day. It seems like sometimes that's how it goes when you're married. One of you has the opportunity to encourage the other when the going gets rough. For me, a good day is getting things accomplished and getting positive encouragement from another co-worker. Both of those things happened to me yesterday. My wife had some expectations unmet where she believed she had communicated some things that weren't followed through on that just started her day off a little rough and then it was hard to not let that color the rest of the day. But, these things gave us a chance to talk more last night than usual before bed. I honestly can't really remember what all we talked about, but it was good for both of us.  Sometimes we ask the question at our house what was the best part of your day and what was the worst part of your day. It's some good questions to ask. To reflect

So I've been thinking a lot over the last couple of weeks about what gear to use to capture our new place down in Gulf Shores while I'm down there next week. I only have 1 week and during a lot of it, I'll be doing renovation work with the other guys. So how am I gonna get things captured and what equipment am I gonna use? That's been consuming a lot of thoughts lately. For one I won't have a vehicle down there, so I'll have to coordinate with others if I want to stay later or get going earlier to get sunrise and sunset shots or even night timelapse. Secondly, I'll be using equipment I'm not as familiar with either such as a drone and GoPros. I know the concept is always the same with photography and video thankfully, but there are still different buttons, different apps, etc. to get used to. I've got a high bar for myself and a lot of learning that will have to be done while I'm down there mostly, so I'm hoping it all goes well. I've got

Sometimes the best way to learn is to just get thrown in and have to do it yourself. Want to learn to fly a drone, to do accounting, to make a table, to file for a permit, or anything else? You'll learn a lot more if you jump in, ask questions, and do it yourself versus have someone tell you everything to do. This is what's going on with my wife right now as our bookkeeper for our rental property business. She said, "I can do that." and so she's had to learn a ton in this past year and do a lot of things wrong in order to get things done right. I would say there's only one other partner in the business that really knows the best way to handle all expenses and taxes and he's super busy and hands-off. It's one of my brother-in-laws and I'm starting to think his philosophy on teaching might be similar to Chip Gaines in that he'd rather you do things wrong and learn from them than he spends a bunch of his time teaching you everything he knows. My w

There's one hill in Morton that I know of for sledding and I took our kids there yesterday. They all absolutely love it. It was the highlight of their day. I think we stayed there for a couple hours and my older two actually road together and carried the sled up the hill by themselves while I went down with our littlest. It worked out well. The hill is at Northwoods Park in Morton and it's on the north side of town. At first, I was wondered if I made a bad decision by taking all three kids by myself, but it worked out great. They had a good time. No one got hurt and we really didn't have much complaining. I consider that a win. And we got outside for half of the day in February! Yes. That's a win. If you haven't gone sledding at Northwoods Park and you have little kids go sledding at Northwoods Park. They'll love it.

What will your weekend be like? Do you have big plans? Are you going somewhere? Staying at home all weekend? Are you doing something by yourself? Do you have a whole family to take care of? Weekends can be tough for me. Not always, but if I don't have a project or a plan for the weekend I can tend to get frustrated with my little kids and not be the father I want to be. I'm not saying that a plan or project is necessary for the weekend at all even for me. It's more my heart needs to be in the right place. I can't get upset about all the little things others do that aren't the way I would do them or the times when my kids do things accidentally because they're kids and they just can't hardly control their bodies right now. I mean I know I can tell them to settle down or don't hit your sister and work with them on those things, but things like spilling water or getting something out that's messy or work for me is ok. I have to realize that I'm in m

Yesterday I spent time with a Spotify customer service person on chat for a while because someone evidently hacked into our account. While my wife was playing some music at home all of a sudden music with explicit lyrics started playing and it kept switching songs every time she tried to play something. It took logging out of everything and resetting our password 4 times to get things fixed, but their customer service person was able to get us taken care of. I'm thankful for people that are willing to help others out with their problems. Even if it starts with a chatbot. I was able to get to a real person and they were able to fix things pretty quickly for us. She also said this won't happen again to us. I hope not, but I don't know how they can guarantee that.

Is it helpful for me to blog every morning as part of my morning routine? It's a good question for me to ask myself. I'm around 750 days that I've done this now and I do like the routine of it and the way I can record some of my thoughts and things that happen in my life. It also gets my mind going and creating early instead of just consuming what others have created. I do want to start preparing more and thinking about my family as well in the morning. What should we be doing as a family? How I can be working with my kids to teach them? Even thinking about how my kids are doing and ways I can encourage them. At one point I was working on our family goals and the good thing about that is there's something that exists, but that bad thing is we're not really talking about them and at least right now they're not being focused on.

Is everything going wireless and USB C (3)? I recently got a new Macbook Pro and the only ports on it are USB C. That's it. Nothing else. No USB, no charging port, no HDMI, no headphone jack, no SD card reader, nothing else but USB C. So now I've been trying to think through all the scenarios that I still have where I need an adapter. So far I've needed to purchase an adapter for my second monitor, for normal USB, and for SD cards.  The craziest part of this whole ordeal has been that my work computer lost the ability to connect to the internet, so I was given a loaner computer which I didn't install my design programs on. Then I received my new computer and it only has USB C. So until I can get all my files transferred over to the new computer from my old computer I'm stuck transferring files around between the 3 computers. Designing on my old one, working with old files. Using the middle one to connect to the internet and do daily tasks and waiting on these adapte

To prioritize. What's important today? What's important tomorrow? What could get done? What should get done? What brings the most value? What brings the least value? How do I know? A bunch of questions racing through my head this morning. Probably most urgent from a work stand point is moving from an old computer to a new computer. Along with that comes additional purchases that need to be made as part of that switch and then just transferring everything. Then we've also got this new property that from a marketing side of things needs a share of my time right now in getting things set up. Then there's also my family, my wife and kids that need my time as well and I need to focus on them as well. Many times I feel like they get some of what's left which isn't a good thing. Then there's the day-to-day work projects that different projects rise and fall depending on the time of year and our focus. Then there's friends and church which also needs to be a foc

It's decided. We've agreed upon a name for our new rental property in Gulf Shores. It was some back and forth last night between The Peach of West Beach and The Little Lady. We ended up deciding on The Little Lady.  We're thinking that part of trademark down in Gulf Shores may be using Lady in the names of our properties. We'll see. I was going back and forth thinking it could could cause some confusion, but we'll see, maybe there won't be any at all. The theme of this place is a mid century modern beach home and we're three weeks away from this being a total reality. Lots of work to do right now. Lots of purchases, hours, and decisions to be made quickly. But we've got a great team with everyone pulling their weight. We'll get it done!

I think this might be the most agonizing part of launching something out into the world. You work really hard on something and get ready to share it but it has to have a name and an identity. It reminds me of being involved with coming up with names for our products at Precision Planting. Many times we purposely call new products things we won't get attached to like "The Hobbit" so that we know the initial name won't influence what it eventually gets called at all when we get the product far enough down the pipeline. It always seemed to come down to the last minute for us until we finally agreed upon a product name to announce to the public. We're facing something similar right now with our rental property business as we get ready to fix up another place in Gulf Shores. It's a little place that sleeps 10 and we're trying to come up with the perfect name for it. So far it's looking like it might be Little Lady, but we're also not sure if we should h

What have you seen lately that really impresses you? Yesterday I decided to sit in on a live launch of a new product from Frame.io. They are a cloud-based software company for video editors that allows for feedback on video to the editor in a collaborative environment online. They had a really impressive new product launch that showcased their first in the industry camera to cloud technology. It's amazing and I can see how out of COVID this technology was born. It basically allows for much smaller teams to be on set and for everything that is shot to be streamed directly to the internet for instantaneous viewing, downloading, editing, color correcting, etc. There is no more waiting for a large hard drive to be delivered or having more people on set to view what is being shot. It saves a ton of time. Not only is the product a huge step forward, but the presentation was awesome too. They basically talked through how the product works by demoing an actual shoot and how fast video and

In a little over 2 weeks I'll be back in Gulf Shores again. A week ago I never would have believed you if you told me this. We found a place that needs some major fixing up and the price was right so we bought it and between me and my brother-in-laws we're heading down for a week of demo and fixing it up so we can rent it this year. We're basically doing something similar to what we did last year, but this place needs more work. I'm pumped and still a little in disbelief that our offer was accepted so quickly. We looked at the place last Friday, put an offer on it on Saturday and the offer was accepted on Monday this week. Now it's a scramble to get a plan in place, purchase materials and stuff for the place over the next 3 weeks and wrap it all up by the second week of March.  The address is 2898 W Beach Blvd in Gulf Shores. We're still trying to think of a name for her. We've thrown around Little Lady and Little Bitty. One of my sisters said the place is q

A week ago my computer just stopped connecting to the internet. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get on. I thought it was my VPN while I was on vacation, but I soon figured out that it wasn't that when I got home and I still couldn't connect and then when I went to the office and couldn't connect either. I'm still not sure why it happened. But, yesterday I was given a loaner computer until I get a new one. Not being able to connect to the internet on a computer left me feeling disconnected while on vacation, even though I could still connect via my phone. I wasn't able to blog on here and there were probably other things I would have tried to do online, but at the same time it was probably good that it happened. I spent less time online and more time with my family while on our trip. Of all the times for the ability to connect to the internet to happen I guess during time off from work was probably the best time for it it to happen. I'm back and read

Yesterday was good. We had a bunch of people over to our place to play in the pool. My brother-in-law and I had all the kids and took care of the guests. I should say my brother-in-law helped with the guests mostly including making them lunch. He's got a gift for being a good host that doesn't make a big deal about hosting and taking care of people. He also took our friends out to fish on the beach and to dig a huge hole with the kids. Our kids had a blast and were so out of it last night by the time it was time to go to bed. I was exhausted by the end of the night too.