Weeknotes 25:22

Posted 4 days ago

Week of May 25–31

Guys night out

My youngest wanted to spend some time with her friend at the downtown library on Wednesday night. So instead of going back and forth over the course of a couple of hours, I asked my son if he would be interested in meeting up after work and grabbing some dinner downtown. He is working downtown this summer as intern. My wife dropped us off downtown and then I met up with my son. After a quick stop at The Space Store, we headed over to City Cafe Diner for dinner. I enjoy hanging out with him and talking about his summer job and his future. He will graduate from Murray State next year.

After dinner, we walked down Broad Street. We were bummed to find out that the Moon Pie General Store had closed. I always enjoyed stopping in to look around when we did things downtown. One of the adjacent shops is selling Moon Pies. You can buy an assortment of a dozen Minis. We also found out that the Moon Pie store had just closed a couple of weeks earlier.

We walked down to the Tennessee Aquarium. I took several pictures that I would like to use in a post about things to do in Chattanooga. A former colleague had contacted me recently because he was going to be in town for a wedding. I thought it would make sense to publish an article that I could point friends to in the future.

It was fun to take some pictures and scratch my creative itch. I also enjoyed hanging out with my son as we walked around downtown.

LEGO

After visiting a local LEGO store, Bricks and Minifigs, a couple of times, I decided to rebuild one of my oldest sets, 487 Space Cruiser. I was a bit disappointed to find that most of it was built. I just needed to add a couple of pieces. I was bummed to discover that I was missing one of the rocket engines but am hopeful I can get a replacement through Bricklinks, Bricks and Minifigs, or Scenic City Bricks, which I have yet to visit.

I had reclaimed my Naboo Fighter from my son the week before and found it in a similar condition, mostly built. I am tempted to take them apart and rebuild them because that is the fun part. I love to build things and had looked forward to building the Space Cruiser from scratch.

I was disappointed to not find a set among my other space sets that I thought I had kept from childhood. Disappointed but to be honest, I have more of an emotional investment in the Space Cruiser and if it was the only Space LEGO set I would have kept, I would be content.

CSS Day

I found out last week that John Allsop and Web Directions were selling a streaming pass for CSS Day which is happening last this week in Amsterdam. There are very few CSS focused conferences and this is one that has been on my radar. I had participated in hover 2021, an online CSS conference that Web Directions did, which is why I got an email and found out about the streaming pass. I talked to my boss and my employer is going to pay for my ticket. I am so excited about this year’s lineup. I am planning to catch some of the sessions live and then watch the archive later.

Highlights of the work week

  • I work with several of our international sites, which has been fun learning experience. One of the sites is in Farsi and so I have been gaining hands-on experience with logical properties. One question came up last week about video controls. I was not sure if they would need to be rearranged right-to-left or if it was better to stay with convention. I reached out to Ahmad Shadeed, who has an excellent resources on RTL styling. His suggestion was to let the video controls go LTR. He covers that in the resource but I had not seen it as a heading. I appreciated that he got back to me so quickly.
  • I enjoyed learning about the if()function and reading-flow. I did a bit of a deep dive reading several articles about reading-flow on Wednesday. And I blogged about it.
  • I had a frustrating time working on a freelance project solution on Tuesday night. I spent about two and half hours on something that I ended up scrapping. I had not set it up in Git and was fortunate that I was able to undo all of my work and get back to a working solution. The first thing I did after that was to set up Git. I always have to remind myself that those times are not a waste. It is all part of the process of finding a solution. I plan to get back to it this week.
  • I started working on a task to add a hero to a page on the Revive Our Hearts site. But as I thought more about the solution, I realized that a bigger win would be to add the ability to add a hero to any page on the site. Because it was a much bigger task, I created a new task for the bigger project and held off on creating a hero on the page I had been tasked with.
  • I worked on a variety of smaller tasks. For one of them, I had to remember how to implement the art direction solution for responsive images. I have not used responsive image solutions in quite awhile so it was fun to revisit.

Articles I read

From LinkedIn

  • I appreciated Jamie’s thoughts on AI tools and the value of actual human colleagues. I would much rather ask a teammate a question and have an interaction with that person that ask a tool. Because the value came more from the interaction than getting an answer to my question, though I needed that too.
  • I am excited to see that my friend Tracy has started a blog to share her journey. Glad that she found a new spark in her career and look forward to learning more of the story.
  • I appreciated Jenny challenging readers to consider how to respond to the ways in which AI could (or is) shift their career. I have not yet read the Axios article she referenced in her post.

What I watched

CSS if() function and reading-flow (Una Kravets, YouTube)

Webbed Sites (Heydon Pickering) – I laughed so hard watching this. Of course, I am also very sad about the state of things that this is poking fun at.

The promise that wasn’t kept (by AI) (Salma Alam-Naylor) – I watched the video and then read the post of the same content.

Unexpected Grace: Nancy and Robert’s story – Years after launching Revive Our Hearts, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth experienced an unexpected love story. I watched this in the midst of doing some QA on the Revive Our Hearts website after a major update to Django CMS.

  • Thunderbolts* (Theater) – I had heard good things about the movie and it did not disappoint. I thought it had great potential and the film delivered on the humor and fun that I thought it could be.
  • M*A*S*H (MeTV)
  • NCIS (Netflix)
  • Light & Magic, Season 2 (Disney+)
  • Captain America: Brave New World (Disney+) – I had wanted to see this in the theater with my oldest daughter but she was unable to make a trip to Chattanooga. I did not think it was a bad film. I really like Sam’s character and had enjoyed Falcon and The Winter Soldier. I liked that they explored Ross’ character more and I felt like all of the character arcs respected the past while moving the characters forward.
  • Mission: Impossible, The Dead Reckoning (Prime) – I wanted to rewatch part one in anticipation of seeing part two in the theater.

Books I am reading

Walking

  • Wednesday – I walked around Downtown Chattanooga with my son after dinner but did not record it in Strava. According to Google Timeline, I walked about 1.5 miles.
  • Friday – 2.01 miles in 36 minutes (my walk was cut short by rain)

What I played

  • MLB The Show 20 (Twins) – I took a no-hitter into the 7th inning.
  • NBA 2K25 (Nuggets)

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