Category Archives: Fun

2024 Reading List with Lots of Books about Food

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2024 was my year where I read six books about making or cooking food, and one about compost, which helps grow food.

In 2025, I need to read a few more books by Edward Carey, Silas House, creativity, and cooking.

My Yearly Plan

Each year, the plan is to read a book a week, and this year I managed two books a month. It’s not bad for thinking I was going to spend less time reading this year and more time learning on YouTube and other websites. I spent too much time watching creators to see what was going on in their lives, more than the ones teaching me things or letting me learn from them.

Again, from mid-November/Thanksgiving until the end of the year, I attempted to finish up a handful of books I was partway through, along with some shorter/more straightforward/easier-to-read books.

The short, easier-to-read ones are between 120 – 150 pages and smaller in size. So I can read them in a few days or a day, depending On how much time I have. The others are 250 – 400 pages and are more involved, and I need to pay more attention while reading them.

NOTE – I typically read a handful of books at once.

Reading more than a book at a time allows me to switch around depending on my mood. If I need light reading or have time to read through something a bit denser that needs more attention, I can.

My List of Books I Read in 2024

My list of books is in the order I read them.

  • Edith Holler – Edward Carey
  • The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Steal Like an Artist – 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative – Austin Kleon (re-read)
  • Show Your Work -10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered – Austin Kleon (re-read)
  • Keep Going – 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad – Austin Kleon (re-read)
  • Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek
  • The Botany of Desire – A Plant’s-Eye View of the World – Michael Pollan
  • Crying in H Mart – A Memoir – Michelle Zavner
  • Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood – Marjane Satrapi
  • Persepolis 2 – The Story of a Return – Marjane Satrapi
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life – Mark Manson
  • Desert Oracle – Volume 1 – Ken Lake
  • Compost – Transform waste into new life – Charles Dowding
  • Never to Small – Creative, compact, and joyful ways to design and live – Never to Small Magazine
  • It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be. – The world’s best-selling book by Paul Arden
  • Dignity – Desert Oracle Books Joshua Tree, Calif. – Ken Lake
  • Everything is F*cked – A Book about Hope – Mark Manson
  • The Bean Book – 100 Recipes for Cooking with all Kinds of Beans – Steve Sando with Julia Newberry
  • Feck Perfuction – Dangerous Ideas on the Business of Life – James Victore (re-read)
  • The Crossroads of Should and Must – Find and Follow Your Passion – Elle Luna (re-read)
  • Do Breath – Calm your mind. Find focus. Get stuff done. – Michael Townsend Williams
  • Finding the Mother Tree – Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest – Suzanne Simard
  • Diet for a Small Planet (50th Anniversary Edition) – Frances Moore Lappe
  • Do Smoke – A modern guide to cooking and curing. Jen Goss and Scott Davis (NOTE – I finished the last 26 pages on the morning of January 1st and was too tired to stay up on New Year’s Eve. )

Total Books Read

I finished the year strong and managed to read 24 books.

More Learning from YouTube

Again this year I continued watching more YouTube to learn about cooking, shooting videos, storytelling, starting a YouTube channel, starting a small farm, etc., and taking a few courses I purchased about editing with DaVinci Resolve.

My Reading Plans for 2025

Here’s to reading about a book every week to two weeks in 2025.

In 2025, I plan to continue to spend more time learning how to shoot, edit, and add special effects/graphics to videos to start my YouTube channel. It didn’t turn out that way last year, but I need to put more effort into it in 2025.

Please comment if you have read any of these books, what you thought of them, and if you have any suggestions.

Cleaning Up My Life

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Don’t worry, nothing like that, I am just cleaning up the apartment (first floor of two family home I rent) and my part of the basement. Kind of was forced into doing this, since the people upstairs noticed bugs. I had seen some over the course of the last year or two when the old tenant and his new wife lived here and thought nothing of it.

The new tenant contacted the landlord about them, which they then had an exterminator come check on it. After looking around I guess they found that we had some cockroaches, while I was at Access U conference. I had lived here almost seven years and noticed the bugs recently and never paid attention to what I was squishing. So the landlord informed me that the exterminator would not spray/treat the house until we got rid of all our (neighbors and myself) cardboard boxes and old papers, since what they eat is the glue and cardboard.

Landlord’s Freaking (just a little bit)

The landlord was a bit freaked out because there were bugs in their rental property along with the fact that the couple upstairs is due to have a baby in like four weeks or so. They want it done yesterday so they can spray or whatever they are gong to do before the baby is in the house.

So for the last two weeks after work and on weekends when I have not had other obligations I have been first going through all the crap, as my mother would call it in my apartment. This has been helpful in the form of having me go through boxes of stuff that I have not looked at in years and tossing, saving, or as much as possible donating things to charity. I have recycled as much paper and others items that I can. I really don’t want fill up a landfill with more junk. No, I’m not a tree hugger, not that there is anything wrong with that, I just want to recycle/reuse as much as I can.

Donations to the Poor

I have donated a ton of clothes (work, casual, jeans, dress shirts, etc.), shoes, ties, and a lot more to Martha’s Table, so they can help out others less fortunate than myself. Even made two trips so far and I might have one more before I’m all done. I ended up getting rid about half of the clothes I owned, since I have not worn most of them in years for whatever reason.

Was at a fairly good point with the upstairs, so spent a few hours Saturday afternoon/evening going through boxes in the basement that contain stuff in them that have not moved or been looked, since I got here almost 7 years ago. I found at least one box so far that contained 5+ year old magazines in it. I had a lot of old magazines upstairs too. Pointer to others once you have read them unless it’s important to you because you, family, or a friend are in it, recycle them or just recycle them once your done reading.

I used to shoot a bunch of model photography back in the day as they say and had boxes and boxes of photos. I ended up transferring them from their cardboard boxes into new plastic containers with lids. Glad Target had 18 gallon plastic bins with lids on sale last week for $6, so I could buy 20 of them. Did not get all the miscellaneous boxes sorted yet since I have to go through to see if there are any important papers in them, like tax form, old bills with bank, or SSN information in them.

Spent Time with Friends

Spent about five hours Sunday(6/14) in the basement with a good friend of mine and her sister helping me consolidate, move, re-box wines. If your wondering why it took so long, it was because I have close to 600 bottles of wine just in my basement. I’m a wine collector, which made one of the landlords request to get rid of all boxes extremely difficult. How am I going to store 600 bottles of wine with no cardboard boxes, without spending thousands of dollars on wine racks, which won’t work downstairs, since floor slopes into center of room? Luckily I have been gathering and saving wooden wine boxes over the last few years, when I could get them.

I finally took my two 47 bottle wine frigs out of their boxes and started them up. Just in case you were wondering the number of bottles they say will fit is incorrect if you are trying to put Burgundy or long odd shaped bottles in them. Now they are loaded with a total of about 60+ bottles, which removes over five boxes from the basement.

Still need to go downstairs the next few nights to finish sorting and dumping the 20 or so boxes I have not looked at in the basement. The slowest part has been going through the old bills and removing the check receipt and bill to be shredded and placing them in one container and everything else  in a recyclable one. Anyone have suggestions to getting rid of old software. I recycled the boxes, but am trying to figure out what to do with all the CD’s and a lot of 2.5 inch diskettes.

A few friends and co-workers have asked if this has helped me feel lighter, less clutter free, and I have told them I will tell them once all of it is done. Right now it is feeling like a second job that needs to be worked on every night after work. I can’t imagine what is like for someone that is a hoarder to have to do a task like this.

Conclusion

If you have  suggestions for doing any of this better or stories similar to mine I would like to here about them.

Hopefully if nothing else you all start, recycling, donating extra stuff, and keep up with stuff on a regular basis so your not forced into having to “clean up your life” all at one time.

Home for 4th of July

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I’m currently at home in Buffalo, NY at my parents to celebrate the 4th of July holiday with my family. After driving almost 9 hours Thursday to get here I spent time with a few friends, my god son, and my parents.

Today is going to be spent with a few one of my brothers, his wife, and three boys (Denver, CO), along with one of my sisters, her husband, and three boys (Columbus, OH). Relaxing and getting ready for the big party on Saturday, which includes my other sister, her husband, and two girls (Buffalo, NY), along with my other brother (Buffalo, NY), two aunts and uncles (Rochester, NY) and a bunch of their kids and grand kids (Rochester, NY and Centreville, VA).

Today should be filled with a seeing how much all my nieces and nephews have grown over the last year, since I have seen most of them. Mostly time will be spent playing hockey in the driveway, swimming in the pool, and a whole lot of cards. We are more of a gin and euchre type of crowd. Even my almost 13 year old (in less than two weeks) and his 10 (?) brother have been playing for a few years and are fairly good last time we played.

The big crowd of 34 people does not get to my parents until Saturday around 1:00 PM. At that time there will 20 adults, if you count me and a few of the others that act like kids most days and then 14 children that are 13 and under. Most are in the 4 to 8 year old range. It should be a nice quite affair at my parents.

Hope you all have a a great 4th of July and drive safely if traveling.

Please leave a message of your plans or what you end up doing for the holiday.

It’s Been a Month and a Half

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I can’t believe life has been so busy that I have not blogged in over a month and a half. Okay, some it was procrastinating on getting things done.

First it was work being busy trying to get a bunch of stuff done and into production, then it was preparing slides for the 2008 DC PHP Conference. After that it was helping get ready for my friends 28th annual pig roast in Cabin John the same week that I was speaking at the DC PHP conference.

I worked Saturday (May 31) doing yard work for pig roast, then Sunday was getting a few things done around the house before meeting about a dozen DC PHP conference goers out for drinks and food Sunday night. Monday, Tuesday (day of my talk), and Wednesday I was at the conference and then the after conference gatherings. You would think not being in the office would be less tiring.

While at the DC PHP conference I talked about tips, tricks, and practical ways to make your website more accessible. I met a bunch of really cool people such as Tony Bibbs, Mike Tutty, Eli White, Ben Ramsey, and many others.

Thursday was my one day back at the office to catch up on e-mail and anything that needed being done. Friday I was off doing more work for the pig roast.Saturday was the big day at pig roast and it felt like a million degrees that day. That was probably do to the fact that even though I was at the party, a few of us including myself still had to work by picking up trash bag etc. during the day.

One of the hardest parts of pig roast is getting myself and others back to friends early Sunday morning (to beat heat and get it over with) to do all clean-up and putting away of all the stuff needed to put on a party for 500 -600 (only 300 – 400 this year because of the extreme heat).

It took a few days to recover from the heat and work related to the pig roast. Now it’s time to get back on track and work on finishing up my couple of web applications in ASP (current language I know to prototype in), start learning PHP so I can convert them into something my web host allows.

It’s off to do house cleaning, laundry, sorting and dumping (Goodwill and trash) and then yard work once it gets cooler, sometime around dinner time. This might take a few days to get done, but it needs to be completed.

Hope to do more blogging, since I have about a dozen different posts started, in need of just a bit of editing, or just titles listed for subjects I want to talk about.

Is it just me or are others blogging less, since using twitter? I feel by using twitter I can get my points across on some subjects but others require a full post to explain all the technical stuff required.

South by Recap – Part 2

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Ok, we are now heading into the busy part of SXSW, that is if there is a slow part at all from the time you get there until you leave days later.

Sunday – (2008/03/09)

Managed to get up and make to see Rob Weychert and Jason Santa Maria do their talk on “Everyone is a Design Critic“. They had a few main point to be made. the first is that a critique should be broken up into three parts. The parts are before, during, and after the presentation of your ideas.

The other main point was the “Top 5 Client Requests”:

  1. My unqualified friend has a different idea.
  2. Purple is my favorite color, why don’t you use it?
  3. We need more stuff above the fold. (People do scroll now.)
  4. There’s so much empty space, can’t you fit it in?
  5. Cant’ you make the logo bigger?

One of the most interesting points was when Rob realized that they were being displayed on the two big screens. So while Stan was talking he just started dancing around behind him.

One of the best presentations that I saw was the next one by Derek Featherstone. His talk was titled “Everything I learned about Accessibility I learned from Star Wars“.

Before Derek started his presentation he came on stage wearing all black with a brown hooded cape. While setting up he turned “Mac Saber” on his laptop, which now made it sound like a Star Wars light saber. By using the MacBooks built in gyroscope yo can pick it up and make it sound as if you had a really light saber in your hands. Ok, now on to his talk.

A few keep points are:

  • “You think you know everything and others know more”.
  • “Storm Troopers are all the same”. Real life things are different.
  • “No, matter what you can see on the surface does not matter to what is underneath”. I think what pretty stuff your page has does not matter as long as your code under the pretty is accessible.
  • “Living people is what matters not validators or screen readers”.
  • “Pass on what we learn to others to channel the FORCE”.
  • “You have to believe it can be done”.
  • “Do or Do Not there is No try”. – Yoda
  • “I don’t believe it, that is why you fail”. – Yoda

The other amazing part of his presentation were the digital Star Wars drawings by Aton Peck.

Went to an internationalization talk by Stephanie Troeth and Stephanie Booth. This was one of those core talks that they added this year. It was interesting and I learned a few things about how to internationalize websites. It was more a discussion between them and the audience of about 25 around one table.

The final big event of Sunday was the “Geeks Love Bowling” event put on by the nclud guys and real hard work of Cindy Li. Cindy and the nclud crew were able to in a few short weeks get enough sponsors to be able to rent out all 52 lanes at the bowling alley and get buses to transport all the people and a bunch of peole that just wanted to watch. On top of all that they had prizes for all the top bowlers for each team and the top three winning teams. The prizes were free copies of the new 2008 Mac Office suite.

The Refresh DC team I was on did not do to badly. I believe we finished in like 14th place we needed only 4 more pins to come in 12th place. Maybe next year we will do better, not that it matters, since we out to have lot of fun and meet new people. We shared a lane with an all woman team from England. I believe most of them had never bowled before. Fun was had by all.

After bowling a lot of people went out and I decided with a few other the Brits and others to go back to the Hapmton Inn and sit in the second floor lounge and talk. it was great time to be able to relax with Cindy, the Matt Harris, John Hicks, Richard Rutter, Anton Peck, and others.

Monday – (2008/03/10)

I attended a few different panels that I normally might not go to see. The first was “Scalability Boot Camp“, were they talked about make sure to monitor your system early and often. That is everything from Disk I/O, memory, and bandwidth.

Another one was the”Design Eye by South By” where they went over how they would re-design the SXSW website to make it better and more usable. What they talked about and showed was really nice, but the build up was to much for what they showed.

Attended the Annual public WASP meeting. Very interesting to see what they are up to and planning on doing in the future.

It was out for the “Great British Booze Off” and the “NXSW” party. I like the Brits party a great deal and had a wonderful time meeting a lot of new people and meeting up with others I had met last year or earlier this year.

Tuesday – (2008/03/11)

I went to a bunch of panels I normally would not have. I first went to the “How to RAWK SXSW and Stay Inspired“. A few key points from this panel was to:

  • Go through businees cards on plan.
  • No, idea is to silly.
  • Read “Cluetrain Manifesto” – cluetrain.com
  • Look for other ideas, etc. at aftersxsw.pbwiki.com – Password – POPRAWKS

The “Secrets of JavaScript Libararies” panel was cool, since it seemed to have all the people that started the different big JavaScript libraries.

The main thing that was said was before picking one of the main JavaScript libraries is to figure out hwat you need them for. Each different one has strengths and weaknesses.

At another panel a cool thing I saw on the person in the row in front of me was a photo application. After the panel I asked him what it was and he said it was PicLens (Firefox plug-in). The following is the description of PicLens from the plug-in page – instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D experience for viewing images across the web.

There was a bunch more stuff that happened during these six great days in Austin, TX. I hope to get to the full set of notes I took in the next few weeks.

Any further explanations or questions please leave a comment.