Another beautiful weekend of skiing
Just completed a fun experiment where I wrote a little Swift code to decipher some of the Fortnite Cipher Quests. It probably took longer to write the code than to do it manually, but it was great learning some basic Swift. You can see my code at Fortnite Cipher Gist
I love the “Made for You” playlists in Apple Music they have helped me find great new music and also rediscover old favorite songs. I just don’t understand why it always takes 15-20 seconds for it to do the weekly update when you tap on the list on or after its update day.
Finished reading: Star Wars: The Battle of Jedha (The High Republic) by George Mann 📚 it was weird reading an audiobook script but I eventually adapted and enjoyed his book.
It was an epic ski day on Thursday.
Gorgeous day in the mountains
Icy ski day followed by Apres Glow lighted tour
It was just warm enough to sit along the river and do a little thinking about all the things while listening to the Skellig album by David Gray
For three years now I have been walking along the river every weekday and often see this heron. The cold weather over the weekend had me worried about it, but I am happy to report it was back this morning enjoying the “warm” sun in one of its favorite fishing and resting spots.
Ice on the Merrimack river as seen from above
Making the most of this cold snap
Sunday River opened Merrill Hill for the first time today. It was great to ski some new terrain for the first time in years.
The large whale backs on White Heat this weekend were epic.
Great ski day!
Wise old bird
Finally seeing the sun again during my morning walk
iOS and iPadOS kept pestering me to turn on Personal focus no matter how many times I said “Not now”. I finally caved and just turned it on, which resulted in my notifications being disabled all weekend. You can imagine my surprise when I turned it on and had 20 unread emails.
Surprise snow
As everybody started sharing the “Year in Review” posts from Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, etc… it occurred to me that Apple Fitness should really add a similar feature. It would be great to see a summary of the various workouts from the year with something like “You walked 360 miles during workouts”. Maybe next year.
Just wrapped up my first full year of Wordle. I got 360 out of 365. Here are the words I missed. 304 - LOWLY 412 - Did Not Finish 454 - PARER 532 - DADDY 553 - SAFER
I seem to get caught up on repeat letters and superlatives.
Glorious snow covered day in the mountains even if the ski conditions were just meh
Snowy evening
Go Kart Garage Retrospective
As a follow up to my previous post, Building a Go Kart Garage, I want to do a quick retrospective on the project in an agile methodology sort of way.
Things that Went Well
Teamwork - Kaleb and I made a pretty good team on this project. We were really good at double checking each others work and more than a few times this helped us from making costly mistakes. I helped drive the project along and he did most of the cutting and assembling of the garage.
Costs - Overall I feel like the cost of the entire project was pretty reasonable for the end product. An equivalent shed from New England Outdoor would go for around $5,000, which is about twice what we paid for materials.
General Implementation - For the most part we didn’t make any big mistakes that required undoing anything we built or purchasing extra materials because of a bad cut (see the Teamwork item above). Usually projects like this involve quick little one-off trips to the hardware store to get one more piece of wood or a new box of screws, but I think we only ran into that situation once.
Memories - It was a great learning experience for both of us and we won’t soon forget this accomplishment.
Things that Could Have Gone Better
Time of Year - We started this project in November in New England, which introduces two challenges: lack of daylight and cold. If we had done this in the summer the project probably could have been completed in half as many sessions. A few times we had to stop because it got dark and then a few times it was just too cold to work on it.
Transport - The Kia Sorento worked out really well and we managed to squeeze everything into or on top of it, but I feel like time was wasted securing stuff to the roof or making multiple trips because we couldn’t fit everything in one trip. If we had a trailer or had stuff delivered it might have made the process easier and involved less trips to Lowe’s.
Planning - The CAD models and YouTube videos were an invaluable resource, but one thing we failed to understand is how the dimensions of the garage didn’t work well with the standard lumber sizes. For example, the doors were each 52” wide, which gave the go kart several inches on each side, but the wood we used for the doors comes in 48” wide pieces. We ended up having to buy 4 pieces to do the doors, when we could have made them 4” smaller and only had to use 2. Similarly the roof ended up being just a little bit too big to match exactly with the standard 4’ x 8’ pieces of plywood and we ended up with a less sound patchwork of plywood.
In Summary
The project went very well despite some of the challenges we faced. The garage looks really great now that it is finished and everybody who has seen it has been surprised at what we were able to build. We learned a lot about building stuff even if there are things we probably didn’t do exactly right.
New Year’s Day at the beach
Finished reading: Serpentine by Philip Pullman 📚 Quick book to kick off 2023