Reading

I don't do a ton of reading, and what I do read comes from:

• Bible and/or other book reading regarding living life with Christ that comes in the morning and any other opportunities I have to read (e.g. falling asleep, bus rides, waiting for people).
• JavaScript, Java, software development, and general technology blogs I'm subscribed to under my work account that I read almost every work day.
• Work email primarily for communication on projects I'm involved in plus day-to-day logistics. This happens every work day.
  
• Additional technical reading for a project at work that varies based on the project and my familiarity with the project.
• Mac, U2, friends', and homelessness blogs I'm subscribed to with my personal email address that I read almost daily.
• Personal email reading that happens daily.
  

As I reflected on 2008, and looked toward 2009, I decided to focus on on applying what I read better. For the blog reading, both for work and personally, I find it's helpful to skim a lot of the feeds to get a feel for what's possible. I hardly ever recall the specifics, but am incrementally building up a search index in my head. That way if I hear someone describe a situation at work or a friend having an issue with their Mac, I can say, "I remember reading...", and then a minute later with a Google search find what it was that I read. To aid with this effort, I'm going to leverage Google Reader's tag functionality more to further categorize the technical blog entries that are worth remembering.

With email, I treat my inbox as my todo list. If it's in my inbox, I haven't dealt with it. Dealing with it may mean reading it, responding to it, or doing some other action item (e.g. signing up, making a payment, etc.). Because of this inbox mentality, I will often send reminders to myself over email. If I need to call someone, I'll email myself at work that I need to do this. As soon as I've taken care of the item, I usually delete the message. This works great for my personal email as it's hosted by Google Apps. With Google as your email hoster, your messages are never fully deleted. You can always search for anything in the past, thus I don't worry about deleting. This isn't the case with my work email though. I have been bitten by deleting email messages that I eneded up needing again in the future, particularly around project details. As a result, I've started creating a folder for each project. That way when a year later someone asks about why we made a certain design decision, I can quickly pull up the correspondence.

Concerning the reading that involves relationship with God and applying it in the world around me, I'm trying to first ask God what he's saying and then ask what he wants me to do with it. I'm really not interested in acquiring more spiritual knowledge. It only has value if applied.

In order to apply, I usually need to summarize what I've learned. If I can articulate it, then I usually have a better change of doing something with it. Sometimes articulating comes from just trying to articulate (e.g. sharing with people who'll have patience when trying to get the words and ideas out). And sometimes, it means taking time to consciously think, recap, review notes, and write a summary. I expect to have more of that on the blog. I find typing much better for me than handwriting, as handwriting can take so long that thoughts queue up and eventually get dropped. Since it's already digital, my as well post it!

I know I'm most successful at this process if I do it when I'm at my best. For me, that's in the morning before the day has really started. At the minimum, I have to engage God before I turn on a computer. The computer gets my mind racing and focused on the details of the day, distracting me from the bigger movement of God. The day's details of the day are important, but they shouldn't be the focus or starting point.

Blog URL has changed

This blog's url is now: http://steve.blogs.loeppky.com. The purpose of this change is to host the blog on Blogger/Google's servers so that user's get a faster experience.

"Kara and Steve" blog created

Since undergoing this Costa Rica adventure, Kara and I have set up a new blog at: http://loeppky.com/karaandsteve/blog/. Posts that apply to us both will be there, but I will still use this blog to post thoughts or observations that are more me than us.

Seattle's water temperature

Q: what is Seattle's water temperature coming from the street into one's house?
A: 45 degree F

A little explanation::
I won't get into the fully backstory, but we need to move the water heater in the upstairs unit of our home comply with code. One option we've been considering is a tankless hot water heater. One thing that affects how effective they are is how much they have to increase the incoming water temperature to bring it to shower temperature (around 115 degrees F). In order to answer this question, you have to know the incoming water temperature. Ideally one would just run water over a thermometer, but I was not at home when I needed to know this, and I couldn't find the information online anywhere. Fortunately someone at Washington Water Heaters informed that incoming water for the Puget Sound is around 45 degrees F. I just wanted to post this so hopefully Google can redirect someone here and help answer the question.

KeePassX - excellent personal data manager software

Just wanted to pass on a software recommendation that can potentially be beneficial for all: KeePassX. Taken from their website: "KeePassX is an application for people with extremly high demands on secure personal data management. It has a light interface, is cross platform and [open source]". I use the program for storing all kinds of personal information (online account login/passwords, software serial numbers, padlock cominations, etc.). The advantages of using a program like this are:

• It's free
• All of your personal information is in one place as compared to being in multiple files or folders - physical or virtual).
• It's searchable, sortable, groupable, etc. thus easier to find a given entry
• It secure - one has to know your master password to get access it to it as all the data is encrypted.
• It's easily replicable by copying to another location, burning to a CD, etc.

After using it for a bit at home and work now, I highly recommend it. You can download it for your platform of choice (Mac, Windows, Linux) here: http://www.keepassx.org/downloads

Quick status update

I haven't blogged in a long while largely due to so much going on our end. Real quick:

With a ton of help from friends and family, a lot of work was done on our home to prepare it to sell. We were unsuccessful in this endeavor, and instead have both units rented out, and thus we've moved out. We will hopefully be temporarily moving to Costa Rica so Kara can further develop her Spanish skills.

I hope to do a more thorough post about what we've learned the last 6 months and discuss more specifically what's coming, but that will have to come in a bit. There are a few more pressing things to take care of at the moment :)

Raleigh/New York City + New York City Travel Tips - May 2008

Kara and I recently were on vacation in North Carolina. We had a blast touring Raleigh and the Outer Banks. We saw a nursing school and the adjacent hospital, we played a few rounds of golf, ate at "Top of the Hill" on UNC's campus among other things.

While in the Outer Banks, we played a few rounds of miniature golf, walked the beach, toured the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, jumped off some sand dunes (my personal highlight) and I got to tour the Wright Brothers museum.

Here's a few pictures from that leg of the trip:


After 6 days wthere, Kara and I headed up to NYC for 4 nights to take in the sights of the Big Apple. Having never visited the city before, I couldn't believe the immenseness of everything coming up to street level from the subway. A few days in NYC made Seattle seem like a small town in comparison.

We were able to take in quite a few sights while we were there including the Letterman show, Broadway, Central Park, Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island, Wall Street, UN Headquarters, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and a few others. We stayed at Hotel St. James on 45th Street, in between 7th and 6th Avenues. If you're familiar at all with the area, we were sandwiched between Rockefeller Center and Times Square (a pretty ideal location).

Overall, it was an amazing time in a great city. In addition, there were a few things we learned that we wanted to post in case it can benefit others:

• Buy reserved tickets for Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island. The ferry takes awhile to load and unload. This process occurs three times (Battery where you get on in New York, Liberty Island, and Ellis Island). We waited some 45 minutes in the rain to get on the ferry the first time despite getting there at 9:15 am when the first ferry leaves at 9:30. Reserved tickets let you come back at a certain time and skip a bunch of this line. Apparently they can be ordered online.
• Purchase a week long unlimited Metro tickets for the subway/bus system if you’re going to be there for 3 or more nights.
• Walk the Brooklyn Bridge, but first take a subway into Brooklyn so you can walk into the city. We accidentally took the JHZ subway line that crosses over the Williamsburg line. It then took a 40 minute bus ride to get to the Brooklyn Bridge.
• Rollerblade in Central Park. We carried our blades in luggage, and this turned out to be a highlight of the trip. You may even have Lance Armstrong blaze by you on his bike a few times! It allowed us to see the entire park in a shorter amount of time given that the park consists of 843 acres (6 miles to go completely around).
• Get 50% off same-day Broadway tickets. Look for signs for “tkts”. Ticket sales open at 3 pm, although people line up before hand. I would get there no later than 2:45. Note: there are two lines, one for plays only and another for musicals. Also, they only take cash, and they didn’t have that posted in anywhere. Some people definitely got burned when they got to the cashier after waiting in line for 30 minutes.
• Request tickets to the Late Show with David Letterman. You can do it online. This too was a highlight, and it’s free! Note: you have to answer a trivia question if they do call you! Requesting tickets this way will guarantee you seats.
• Buying breakfast and lunch supplies can save a lot of money for other activities. We hit up the closest Whole Foods and were good to go.
• If you want a great Italian dinner, be sure to hit up Little Italy.
• Check out the Federal Hall. This historic landmark/museum is located right in the middle of Wall Street. It felt like we had teleported to Washington D.C. as we were getting a heavy dosage of colonial history. I had forgotten that the government was first situated in New York when Washington became president.
• Don’t expect to see much at the Twin Towers. They are heavy into construction, and have a lot of the site boarded up to prevent traffic from slowing down due to onlooking drivers.
• The American Museum of Natural History is a great museum to see. I think they have the largest collection of dinosaur fossils of any museum in the world. We weren’t able to see all the exhibits even though we spent nearly 3 ½ hours there, so we recommend picking out your top exhibits and making sure you see those first rather than tackling the entire museum floor by floor given you could spend an entire there taking in all that it has to offer. Also, the museum has a suggested $15 donation to go through the museum. If you would rather not pay the full suggested fee, be sure to enter through the main entrance that faces Central Park. There are self-service pay stations located there.

Here are a few pictures from our time in New York. If you would like to see the rest, click here to go to our Picasa Web album.