December 2016 – What I’ve Been Doing at 8:16 PM (20:16)

Here is my December 2016, installment of what I had done at 8:16 PM each night during the month. I also found it helpful writing down what happened during the day as a small journal/diary of what was good, bad, or interesting.

Little Background

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:16 (8:16 PM) every day for the last month after reading Kitt Hodson’s Pastry Box article from Jan 1, 2015. Which was about how a year earlier she read Erica Douglass’s article about writing down what she did at 11:11 AM and 20:14 (8:14 PM) everyday.

December 2016 Events

Dec 1 – Sitting at my house watching the newest episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” Not that exciting of a day at the office. We continued to work our way through the DEVELOPER.dol.gov website broken or redirected links.

Dec 2 – Sitting over at my buddy Ron’s house getting ready for the music to start back up. That was after first going to St. Elmo’s to correcting an issue my “10k Apart” and “Ate Here” application had when hitting enter on the “Submit” form without picking a city, state, or location. Along errors that occurred when a person attempted to mess with the URL to see what they would end up displaying. Worked wasn’t that busy besides a few things that showed up and had to deal with them. We continued to work our way through the DEVELOPER.dol.gov website broken or redirected links along with sending the government tech boss the five JIRA issues to see if he could find the proper place to direct people on the website.

Dec 3 – Walking with friends from St. Elmo’s to an Italian place on Mt. Vernon Ave. to grab dinner after watching the Del Ray, VA, tree lighting ceremony from the bar at Pork Barrel restaurant. I met most of the same friends at St. Elmo’s for coffee in the morning after sleeping in until 10:05 AM. Once I left St. Elmo’s I stopped home quick and then headed to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work on updating broken or redirected links in my slides. Then went over to Pho 75 to grab a small bowl of Pho with raw round eye and fatty brisket with extra noodles and extra fatty brisket. Next, I went to Boccato Lounge to continue working on my “Ship in Six’ project.

Dec 4 – Laying on my sofa reading Twitter while watching last weeks episode of “Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain” waiting for this weeks show to start at 9:00 PM.

Dec 5 – Working in my spare bedroom on my ARIA slide pages to now use HTML5 instead of XHTML code. Doing so will help reduce the page weight by a few bytes along with making it cleaner and easier to read.

Dec 6 – Eating veggie lasagna at my buddies in Cabin John while tasting a few different Italian red wines. Today wasn’t my day to commute. Had to get into work early for an 8:30 AM meeting and Metro took an extra 20 minutes which only gave me 10 minutes to grab breakfast before the meeting. Then getting to leave 30 minutes early meant getting home at 6:15 PM which is when I would normally get home. So an extra 30 minutes to commute home. To get to Cabin John, it takes about 35 – 40 minutes at none rush hours times. During rush hour in the rain today it took about an hour and 15 minutes to get there, so it was nice to spend time with friends catching up and having a nice simple meal with some wine. The trip home only took about 40 minutes.

Dec 7 – Started updating my NVA and DCA JSON files for both my 10k Apart’ and “Ate Here” websites. The changes I made were to correct grammar for Stachowski’s Market, added an asterisk to Beefsteak which I haven’t gone to, and added Vaso’s Kitchen.  Also, updated my slides to use HTML5 where they didn’t break them because the JavaScript was looking for things from XHTML. My work day consisted of attending a team meeting, then looking over a bunch of Microsoft Word documents before meeting with the creator on how best to make them accessible since they had 20 documents to change. We decided on a plan and they were going to correct one document first to make sure that was accessible before doing the rest of them. Later in the day had to come up with a list of things content creators should think about when creating content. Luckily we already had an accessibility checklist document that I could start with and in about fifteen minutes had a good first draft to send to the necessary people.

Dec 8 – Sitting in a stranger’s living room in DuPont Circle area listening to a two piece band play music and answer questions as part of “The Little Salon” event. Which is a monthly creative art, music, spoken word, etc. event that moves around the DC area and is held in different people’s home. I managed to find a nice comfy chair and sat back and watched the event move around. During the first break, I managed to locate the restroom on the second floor and then updates to the third floor to see the study and seating area which also had another bedroom up there. A part of the whole center of the house was open to the third floor so all the light from the skylight could get down to the bottom of the house. When I left closer to 9:15 PM to catch the metro when I was outside you couldn’t tell at all that there were 80 – 100 people inside the house. I also tried a six types of shrub (bitter mixer) and bought two bottles from one of the vendors there.

Dec 9 – Finishing up a small bowl of raw round eye and fatty brisket Pho with extra noodles and fatty brisket with my buddy Sam at Pho 75. At work during the day, I worked on reviewing a few PDFs for accessibility issues.

Dec 10 – I was home taking a two and a half hour nap until right before 9:00 PM after doing web work and meeting a few people at St. Elmo’s in the early morning. That was before heading out to meet old ARMY.mil co-workers and their significant others for lunch at Maketto and then off to a few wine stores for wine tastings which were mostly champagne. First, we went to MacArthur’s and tried about 8 – 12 champagnes and I bought a few hundred dollars worth of wine for only six five bottles. Then is was off to Wide World of Wine where I/we tried three Spanish wines. Here I only bought two wines for about $260, but these were older wines from two of my favorite producers in the world. Then finally, to Pearsons for a few more champagnes. I ended up buy four more wines there which were Piccolo Cru. After that, we headed over to 2 Amy’s to grab some pizza and other appetizers.

Dec 11 – Driving back from William’s after figuring out where the pre-CSUN road trip will be which is going to be Los Angles, CA. WE might meet up with one of William’s friends while we are there. We are going to look for AirBnB places near Venice Beach so we can either spend the whole tie there relaxing or use at a base to go and eat a=our way around LA. Then I helped William with getting firewood for the main house along with help to clean out the gutters. Then we each stacked a ton of pig feed (barley and corn) and once that was done we went and filled up the pig feeder with a dozen bags and finally filled the water tank at the back of the barn, so the pigs had water to drink for the day. We had to make sure to blow out the water hose so that it didn’t freeze and crack because it was so cold (34F and felt colder with the windchill).

Dec 12 – Working on making updates to my presentation slides in my spare bedroom.

Dec 13 – Sitting in Cabin John, MD, for Barry’s birthday with Bev and Aimee on Skype from Chicago while eating box frozen pizza and drinking a few nice red wines from Matt Cline while the girls drank the same wines in Chicago. Attended the work Xmas party/potluck lunch. As usual, I brought cheese and crackers.

Dec 14 – Was working on a bit of paperwork. Another slow day at the office but managed to enter an issue in JIRA at 10:00 AM before the standup meeting and we worked to get it fixed, tested, and in PROD by 3:00 PM. Which could be a record of fixing something in five hours start to finish.

Dec 15 – Watching The Big Bang Theory where they are having a baby girl. Spent the part of my day going over the changes I wanted to make to the DEVELOPER.dol.gov dataset pages to only use one set of information instead of one for desktop and another for handheld along with making it accessible and using one set of TABLEs to do it all. Plus, started reading an article about CSS Flexbox and Gird where I noticed they used a max-width which gave me the idea to use min-width for IE stuff and it looks like it will help correct are display issues with IE in handheld made or at least make it better. We are not expecting people to use IE in a narrow handheld width much if at all. Finished up my paperwork and updated the NYC JSON file for both my 10k Apart and Ate Here applications which were missing Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop and had two versions of Ippudo Ramen in them.

Dec 16 – Driving from Pho Viet Flare on Van Dorn on my way to Wegmans to do some grocery shopping and to look if they have any Hardywood Gingerbread Stout for my buddy Sam. I managed to get my shopping done and could not find any Gingerbread Stout the first two times I looked around where it typically is stored. After talking to another couple that was looking for Hardywood beer and showing them, I went over to the area where they keep the new bomber bottles and saw some weird looking bottles that caught my eye. Doing so let me notice that there was one lone Gingerbread Stout mixed in with everything else.

Dec 17 – Driving from my buddy Sam’s house after having dinner that Bangkok Golden on my way to Boccato Lounge to continue working on reading through the “Ship in Six’ old e-mails and finding places on AirBnB in Venice Beach, CA. I was look where we wanted to stay at during our mini road trip before CSUN at the end of February. We had the usual of crispy rice salad, duck laab, and pork drunken noodles at Bangkok Golden. We first drove to Banh Mi DC Sandwich to pick up a few egg rolls and a roast pork Bahn Mi for later or lunch on Sunday. Managed to get about a three-hour nap in the afternoon instead of doing more reading on Ship in Six e-mails and Pho at Pho 75.

Dec 18 – Not sure if I was reading Twitter, a book, or watching TV after spending a good part of the day making updates to GitHub and reading through the “Ship in Six” e-mails from Amy Hoy along with taking notes on them and the “Stacking the Bricks” podcasts and a few videos from the “Ship in Six” series.

Dec 19 – finishing up a phone call with a college friend to see what her plans for Christmas were with her family, parents, and brothers and sister, along with her grandchild and son. Instead of doing work after the day job I spend about an hour and twenty minutes on the phone talking to the older of my younger brothers, along with my youngest sister on how things had been going, the weather, plans for the holidays, and how all their kids were. Figured I would be easier to talk before the holiday weekend when things were a bit slower and less hectic.

Dec 20 – Checking my GitHub issue comment through Grammarly after making changes to the way the address information is displayed. I removed the words “Address” and “Phone” from the screen along with adding a line break when the street address ends and again if a second address is there. Next, I need to move the last few days updates to the server so I can have people check them out.

Dec 21 – eating a small bowl of Pho with fatty brisket, raw round eye, extra noodles, and extra fatty brisket over at Pho Viet Flare on Van Dorn St. in Alexandria, VA.

Dec 22 – Watching TV but nothing that exciting that I never wrote it down. Needed to relax and unwind a bit. We finally, started working on consolidating the dataset TABLE information on the DEVELOPER.dol.gov dataset pages from two different sources only to use one by using “flexbox” in our CSS. After playing around a bit with using “min-width” for the mobile data, TABLE cells corrected the display issues for IE browsers. I managed to find time to show a co-worker how we were going to consolidate the dataset TABLE information too, along with starting on my DAD JIRA issue. Which ended up being one of the top five largest pages of the 40 or so pages we need to fix.

Dec 23 – taking a few hour nap after getting out of work at 3:00 PM. Finished up the large DAD JIRA issue I started along with finishing the second one and almost completed the third one before going home at 3:00 PM. After work I to the red line to the New York Ave metro station to head over to A. Litteri’s to get some cured meat because they were open until 6:00 PM and I would not have to go on Saturday then. Luckily they were not too busy, so I made sure to give a nice tip to the two older guys that wait on me all year when I go in on Saturday’s.

Dec 24 – Having Christmas Eve dinner over at the Kamin’s and having great conversations a diverse set of people. Spent the morning at St. Elmo’s to visit with friends then it was off to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work on taking notes from Amy Hoy’s Ship in Six e-mails along with updates to GitHub. Only managed to get a short nap.

Dec 25 – Relaxing and watching TV after napping mid afternoon after going to see the new Star Wars movie “Rogue One” and then driving around DC to see what was open along with what people were doing. On the way home I stopped at “Bob and Edith’s” to have breakfast for a late lunch

Dec 26 – I was watching reruns of American Pickers while catching up on Twitter and doing a bit of relaxing too. Went to St. Elmo’s to visit with friends until about 12:30 PM and then headed over to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to have some hot chocolate. I worked at reading and taking notes on the final few “Ship in Six” e-mails from Amy Hoy. Worked on making updates to GitHub which I think was creating ReadMe files for my slide presentation folders since they were missing and might help explain more what the folders were about.

Dec 27 – Sitting in Cabin John at my buddy Tony’s house with two other friends drinking a 1999 Château de Beaucastel which they all thought was great. I had some issues since I managed to burn my tongue a few days ago while eating a small bowl of Pho. During the day I managed to complete three DAD JIRA issues. After the others left spent some time talking to Tony about my buddy William’s pigs and what he thought they needed which were mostly to have more intermuscular fat. We spent more time talking about his pigs in general.

Dec 28 – Backing up my iPad mini 3 while pushing updates to the DC JSON file for “Cucina Al Volo”. Working on cleaning up some e-mail along with adding a few things to GitHub for my 10k Apart and Ate Here repros. Need to add two restaurants one to the DC JSON file and the other to the NVA JSON file. Today at work I managed to get through four more DAD JIRA dataset issues along with starting the fifth one which is one of the most difficult files to update since it contains 26 different tables.

Dec 29 – In my kitchen filling up my water bottle along with grabbing some Mortadella and Provolone cheese. I did some QA and accessibility testing of the ILAB Android Child Labor application. Once that was done, I continued working on updating another developer dataset page.

Dec 30 – Sitting at a table in Pho 75 reading an article from Twitter while waiting for my food. I managed to finish two more DAD JIRA issues at work even though we got to go home two hours early. Managed to get about a two-hour nap after doing a bit of reading what happened n Twitter during the afternoon.

Dec 31 – Lying on my sofa reading Twitter and watching Ohio State lose to Clemson in the Fiesta Bowl. Met friends at St. Elmo’s this morning and chatted over two hours. Then went to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work on making more updates to my Ate Here and 10k Apart JSON files with new places to eat. Next, I went to Earl’s Sandwiches in Arlington, VA, to try two of their sandwiches and have the rest for dinner while watching football/TV in the evening. I got the turkey pesto, roasted red pepper, cheese, pickles, etc. special along with eh “Bay of Pigs.” I ate half of each and saved the rest for later. I then added more money to the meter and went down to Boccato Lounge for some hot cider while I worked on posting my “what I did at 8:16 PM” for the month of November around 3:30 PM. While getting everything ready to post my December one too once, I finish this bit of writing. Once I left there, I picked up a buddy of mine, and we headed to Banh Mi DC Sandwich to pick up some egg rolls t snack on while watching football. We then stopped at the Good Fortune Grocery Superstore to pick up some roast pig which I planned to use with some Ramen over the next few days. Our final stop was at Total Wine to help my buddy pick out a six pack of miscellaneous beers. WE managed to grab three IPA’s, two stouts, and one porter. During the afternoon I realized I had written a hundred or two words shy of 31,000 for my “What I was doing at 8:16 PM” each day this year. Once this is done, I should easily be over 31,000 words. Next year I will attempt to write more, so I get to 40,000 words along with less spelling and grammar errors.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this has been helpful to you and gets you to keep track of what you do a particular time of the day, along with a short daily diary entry to see what you have done or can accomplish over the course of a year.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:16 PM some evening, please leave a comment. Or a suggestion of something that is not part of my ordinary life you think I should do.