Here is my February 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.
February 2016
Feb 1 – Watching the Casey Neistat episode of Reddit’s Original series called Formative ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPH7eIVahIM&index=5&list=PL8akVAD_Ef4cItKR53SGzTa4B5lJ1OZUC ) where he talks about growing up in Connecticut and realizing after his girlfriend whom he had a two-year-old baby with left him he needed to do something else. All the other talks are about a persons Ah Ha Moment (Oprah) or the “F this Moment” from Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman’s 30 x 500 and whatever others call the moment they realized they need to make a change that would change the trajectory of their lives. Today at the office I managed to start the process of cleaning up old or never run scans in Compliance Sheriff along with removing users that no longer were part a DOL or their previous teams. I think my chest cold is mostly gone, but since late in the afternoon my throat has been bothering me. I hope I’m not getting a sore throat at this point.
Feb 2 – Sitting in Cabin John for wine with a few friends I hadn’t seen since before Christmas. I brought a 2003 Gamba Zinfandel along with a 2001 Rhone blend.
Feb 3 – Watching “2 Broke Girls” after a long day. I needed some mindless TV to relax after work.
Feb 4 – Watching “Big Bang Theory” while laying on my sofa.
Feb 5 – Reading “Food for Thought and Thought for Food” in my living room by Ferran Andrea.
Feb 6 – Watching “MythBusters” while eating avocado sushi from Wegmans. I grabbed some while doing grocery shopping earlier in the day.
Feb 7 – watching Carolina Panthers attempting to get another touchdown with less than a minute to go in the first half of Super Bowl 50.
Feb 8 – Having dinner with William and Sam at Bangkok Golden. We ordered crispy rice salad, duck Laab, and drunken pork noodles.
Feb 9 – Listening to Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman’s episode 16 “How do you design products people love?” of Stacking the bricks and taking notes. It’s going to make listening to this 50+ minute talk with them and Scott Hurff take like two hours because of stopping and start to hear what they say and then taking digital notes to make sure I understand the ideas better. Busy day of responding to accessibility related e-mails. I would send out one response then someone else would ask a question and once done with that one the first person was back for more and so on for about three or four sets of e-mails. Then did accessibility review on the external VETS 4212 before meeting with the developer in the early afternoon after set up the meeting during the middle of my e-mail storm. Meeting went well. Pointed him to more resources on how to fix the problems, along with explained again what the problem was and even showed him with JAWS when it made sense to help understand.
Feb 10 – Talking with Jason, Jeremy, Russell and others at Busboys and Poets at 14th and V St., NW, about indie web movement. Which is about publishing information on your personal website and then pushing it out to others. How about getting stuff done with your work but also trying to help each other and playing people stuff. A bit of an interesting day at the office trying to have people asking which excess ability issue is more important than another. They’re all important depending on which type of disability a person has. Someone who is blind doesn’t care about color contrast, but that would be important to somebody that is low vision. Or captioning is being missing for video not important to a blind person but very important part of your deaf person. Or keyboard access not available to either blind people are people of mobility important but not to someone who can use a mouse.
Feb 11 – Watching the “Big Bang Theory”. Had another day of testing VETS 4212 along with trying to figure out an order of importance for accessibility issues than it depends on what type of disability which makes it important to them.
Feb 12 – Eating a small number 10 Pho with extra noodles at Pho 75 with Sam. Did more accessibility review of the VETS 4212 application to get us closer to moving the updates to PROD by the end of the month.
Feb 13 – Watching “MythBuster’s” after a late lunch/early dinner of Pho at Pho 75. Needed something to help hydrate and warm me up after an hour massage. Met up with most everyone at St. Elmo’s this morning. Planning on going back on Monday since list everyone is off for the Presidents Day long weekend and to see Mike one more time before he sends six months in Afghanistan.
Feb 14 – Went to Hoffman 22 to watch the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts along with the Action Shorts. Doing this allows you to see 10 Oscar nominated movies in a little over four hours. The animated shorts seemed to run from five to fifteen minutes, so they added four or five extra to make it last an hour and twenty minutes. The action shorts run anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes. Of the animated shorts, I liked the “Bear Story” and the “World of Tomorrow”, which was a bit weird with stick figured drawings were a clone of a young girl named Emily comes back to inform her of a few things, and she could see into her future. The action shorts I like was “Day One” and the ” Stutter” we’re a guy that stutters had been doing the online dating thing for six months, and the woman was traveling to his town and wanted meet. During the movie, he was learning sign language and pretended to be deaf or hard of hearing when people asked him questions. He didn’t want to meet the woman at first, but when they met, we found out she was deaf, which was most likely why he was learning sign language.
Feb 15 – I was in my basement putting in the first of two loads of laundry. Needed to do a load of sweats, hoodies, thick towels and the like, along with sheets, socks, etc. Next I went St. Elmo’s to meet up with the crew and then it was off to Pho 75 for my third small bowl of Pho with raw round eye and fatty brisket with extra noodles since Friday night’s dinner. Once done came back for a three-hour nap.
Feb 16 – walking to counter at Barnes and Noble to purchase a few magazines, but first stopped at new hardcover books to see what they were. Worked from home because of icy streets and roads. Worked on finding accessibility priority/severity scorecard blog posts and one video. Once done went to Staples to pick-up highlighters and sticky tabs to use one DHS Trusted Tester book.
Feb 17 – Sitting in Blackboard conference room listening to Harris’s talk at Accessibility DC. The talk was informative, but the question and answer discussion afterwards was helpful to the audience and gave Harris a bunch of other ideas for the next class, along with some ways to make it scale.
Feb 18 – Sitting at iStrategyLabs listening to Nguyet and her co-worker Tommy talk about how they started thinking about accessibility from the beginning of their project.
Feb 19 – Watching “Dinners, Drive-ins, and Dives” episode where they visit John Mulls butcher and Road Kill BBQ. Waiting for William to text me so we can get others ready to go to Bonchon Chicken for dinner.
Feb 20 – watching the Mythbusters episode about “Rockets” after spending the day at 1776 for World IA Day. Enjoyed the following three talks: “Influencing Invisible Architecture” by Mick Winters, Head of Bank Experience Design at Capital One, “Architects of Collaboration: How NPR Created A Culture of Innovation” Scott Stroud, Lead UX Strategist at NPR, and “Practical Pitfalls Unraveled: Insights for the Growth-Seeking IA (Workshop)” Sarah Brooks, UX Designer and Career Coach at General Assembly / Faz Besharatian, Consulting Designer at General Assembly. Followed by the lightening un-conference talks in the afternoon. I was nice to get a few people to go with me to Naan and Beyond for Indian food. Enjoy the chicken Biryani which contained long grained Basmati rice cooked with succulent pieces of chicken blended with exotic herbs, served with raita that Emily and i split. We each added a veggie samosa to fill out our plates.
Feb 21 – watching TV after a day of mostly sleeping. Went to bed at midnight woke up at around 8 AM and read for about a half hour and then went back to sleep until 12:35 PM. Got up, showered, drive to Pho 75 for lunch, then to St. Elmo’s for hot apple cider and updating info about restaurants for blog posts. Once home read for a bit and then napped for another two and a half hours. So I slept for about fourteen and a half hours in last 24 hours.
Feb 22 – walking out of Wegmans after eating dinner of three kinds of chicken, Indian basmati rice, and some shrimp. Today was mostly spent in three meetings two of which were an hour and a half long while the last one was about 45 minutes. The rest of the day I tested the newly updated VETS 4212 accessibility external and internal pages.
Feb 23 – Reading over Twitter in bed after coming home and taking a little over an hour nap because I wasn’t feeling all day. Went to work today even though I was not feeling all that well because we only had a few more days to complete the first pass of testing of VETS 4212. If this weren’t the case, I most likely would have stayed home.
Feb 24 – LivingSocial with Jason Garber for Home Brew Club meet-up to work on your website as the source for all your web content during tornado warning/heavy wind and rain. Because of the bad weather we were the only ones to show up. On my way from Metro Center metro to LivingSocial, there was lightening off in the distance as I half way there was a huge flash of light and a loud clap of thunder. My guess would be that it was at the mall or at least over in Roslynn. I ended up gathering address, phone number, hours, website information for a few blog posts about places eat to help get people give them an idea of the type places you can store in my “Gotta Eat Here” application. Figured it was the best time to fill out my outlines for these posts. Spent the day testing VETS 4212 for accessibility issues along with figuring out what needed to be tested for Ideamill.
Feb 25 – Watching “The Big Bang Theory” episode about Sheldon’s birthday that had Adam West (original TV Batman) Will Wheaton, and a cameo of Steven Hawkins singing happy birthday from a computer.
Feb 26 – Eating a small bowl of Pho with round eye and fatty brisket along with extra noodles at Pho 75. Busy day in meetings about accessibility test results, testing VETS 4212 again after updates have been made. Found that the updated code was not pushed properly and had to test again. Also had a meeting about Kanban planning and filling the system with work.
Feb 27 – Watching Reddit Mythbuster episode where they want to see if Buster (crash test dummy) will survive a 1,000-foot fall when in one of those inflatable hamster balls. They also wish to know if a viral video using an infrared video showing a person farting is real or not. The last item is they wanted to see an exploding glitter bomb and to see what happens when you explode a Snoo (Reddit mascot) which is one of those inflatable nylon characters.
Feb 28 – Watching the pre-Oscar show on ABC while I wait to see what Chris Rock has to say about no black actors being nominated if the four main categories, along with the current presidential politics. Woke up before 7 AM and did some reading, along with Internet work. Went back to sleep for an additional hour. Finally, got moving around 11 AM. Showered and went to St. Elmo’s for some hot cider, bill writing, and updating my what was I doing at 8:16 PM since I had only out in a few notes for a few days. I left there around 12:45 PM to get an hour massage as a belated birthday present to myself. After my massage had finished, I went to Pho 75 for a late lunch. Next went to Boccato Lounge for some tea while working on updating my Gotta Eat Here blog posts with information on the location, phone number, website, hours of operation, etc. for each of the restaurant. When I was done there headed to the Apple Store to look at the iPad Pro. Followed up by a bit of shopping at Whole Foods.
Feb 29 – Logging into Trello to updated a few more “Gotta Eat Here” blog post outlines. Most likely going to start adding places to eat to the blog posts outline for places in New York City, which shouldn’t be too bad since I have most of the information like address, phone number, hours, website, etc. already from my trip there last year. More testing of both VETS 4212 and Ideamill for accessibility issues again today.
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.