Last week my younger brother Phillip hit me up to go grab a beer and some dinner at Jazz, a New Orleans themed restaurant. He knew some people playing background music there. For whatever reason, the band cancelled last minute and we went to Shakes instead.
So this week, he hit me up again as the band was playing the same night of the week, Thursday. We got there at 6:30. There was a 25 minute wait. It was packed. We waited it out and finally got inside and sat down at a table close to the band. They played soft rock classics with acoustic guitar, keyboard, and bass. It was a mellow texture but kind of an odd sound at times.
However, it was not nearly as odd as the vibe of this place. There was something different about the patrons that night. Lot's of couples. In fact, almost exclusively. I figured it was just a popular place to bring a date.
Then Phil recognized a former co-worker. We chatted a bit and asked what brought them there and they said "Coming here is a tradition. This is where we come every Valentine's Day.
Valentine's Day. SHIT! We totally forgot. His co-worker laughed at our naivety.
My older brother Clay looks a lot similar to me these days but Phil and I look too different to be obvious brothers at this point. It was uniquely awkward thinking about how folks probably thought we were a couple.
We laughed it off and proceeded to enjoy ourselves but I'll remember this funny story for the rest of my life!
At work, yesterday and today marked our quarterly hackathon. I already explained the preperation for this all last week.
Earlier this week, Conner Ruhl and I decided to make a team and demo our visions for bringing together Carfax's data into one single GraphQL API.
Thursday was the official start but we hardly had any time to work together as we both wrestled other issues and duties. Luckily, I had a lot prepared from the extra work I had been doing the last few weeks and Conner had been thinking about how to talk about it for a long time. So when it came time to put together our 5 minute demo, we had plenty of minutes (too much, in fact). And despite some techical difficulties and my crazy nerves during the presentation, we were able to get the point across and won the award for "Best Productivity Boost."
That Hackathon presentation earlier today and the demos I gave to my product owners throughout the week I believe were successful in planting seeds for making the things I want to happen a priority.
That would make my work life at Carfax better and more challenging.
Just ate my first Freshly meal... It was delicious but didn't quite fill me up. That's probably a good thing as it makes my habit of stuffing myself impossible. I'm not sure if it's worth the price though. I'll try it for a month probably and go from there. I also ordered a bunch of bottles of soylent to have as a snack. All this and making breakfast myself in the morning might sustain me and buy me back some time.
My Digial Audio Interface, the Focusrite Scarlett 18i20, is not working reliably currently. My Macbook Pro almost never recognizes it now after one night using a different piano synth plugged into USB at the same time. Not sure if that's related but I got to get this fixed soon so I can be productive again on my musical commitments.
Now that I'm done hacking on Carfax stuff, I'll likely shift all of my attention for the time being on writing more features and content for PAPIO
Started seeing a chiropractor. Carfax has good benefits that make these visits basically free so I'm going to take advantage of that. My lower back hurts with constant pain when I sit all day. I probably have a pinched nerve. After 3 short visits (this office, Boehmer Chiropractic, is really swift and efficient) I can say that I feel a bit better immediately afterwards but am unsure if it has started to "heal" whatever is wrong. We'll see. At this point, I'm down to try something.
Anyway... later,