My wife and I brought her car into the dealer tonight because its passenger-side-mirror lane-checking camera stopped working. I wonder if the global chip shortage is going to make a repair pretty much impossible.

I gave my presentation today. It went very well. It was all I achieved today, though. As soon as it was over, I couldn’t do anything for the rest of the day.

My next presentation for work is tomorrow morning. I am really looking forward to it. I think I created a solid concept and structure for my team’s talk. I hope good things come of it.

My Instant Pot beef stew came out very well. I didn’t use a recipe; otherwise I would share it. I simply dumped all the ingredients in raw, cooked it under high pressure for 40 minutes, let the pressure naturally, and let it sit on the warm setting for 40 more minutes. It was nearly perfect.

I’m attempting to cook a beef stew in the Instant Pot right now. I’m not sure if it will come out right. I don’t make stew that often, and when I do I usually use a slow cooker or (gasp!) my stove and oven. If it works, though, it could be a game changer for me. I both need to use the Instant Pot more often, to justify its place on my counter, and I need more convenience in my approach to cooking big meals.

I don’t know what I want for Hanukkah or Christmas. I feel like I’m letting down the people in my family who want to buy me a gift. It makes me sad to think about it.

I have a corner desk that is connected to a second, straight desk, which looks really cool, but is a pain (literally) to use. While it offers me enough space for two desktop computer setups: a necessarily sloppy-looking windows laptop-and-monitor setup for work, and a more streamlined Mac mini-and-monitor setup for home, it causes a lot of problems. The desktop is so high that it puts pressure on my forearms when I use the keyboard, which leads to wrist pain. The desktop on the Mac side is not level and there is no way to adjust it, so the monitor is always tilted slightly, which drives me crazy. The desk drawer and keyboard tray are too low and bang into the top of my legs. Lastly, the keyboard tray, when open, blocks the desk draw, which is super annoying.

There’s a lot more to it than just the desk setup. There are low cabinets and high bookshelves stretching across two walls of my office, all connected into a big L. You can see that it is made up of many different components, but they are all stuck together with no space between the seams. For the past eleven years I thought it was glued together by the house’s prior owners, but my father-in-law pointed out to me tonight that I was mistaken. The furniture is screwed together; it was designed to attach. Therefore, it will be a straightforward (though physically demanding) process to separate it and get it out of my house. I could even keep the bookcases and low cabinets that aren’t bothering me especially, to make room for a new, completely separate desk.

I am relieved to know that something can be done that falls short of hiring a demolition crew to break all this stuff apart and haul it away. I can get rid of the desk portions only, which I didn’t know was possible. That would leave me with 68 inches of space for a new desk. It will be more difficult to figure out how to accommodate both my Mac and PC setups, with all the USB peripherals and so on, but that is a problem that technology and money can probably solve.

One fun thing I did with my daughter tonight is to compare the slide decks we are developing. I’m working on an InsurTech presentation for work, and she created a Civil Rights & Women’s Suffrage presentation for school. I think it’s fun for her to see that we are doing a similar thing.

Tonight I walked her through the concept of a build slide using one I created for my talk next week. On a build slide, the content pops in one element at a time, which allows you to step the audience through a step-by-step process without overwhelming them by showing all the steps up front. (If overused or distractingly animated, build slides are annoying. Judiciously used, they can be very effective.)

I also showed my daughter how I use different and varied visual layouts to make my slides visually appealing. I showed her that good slides tend to have only a few things on them—six or fewer, usually. I tried to explain how to incorporate icons with text, but my business-y examples of icons meant nothing to her, so I don’t think she grasped it.

She was most impressed to see that I write a lot of text in the speaker notes section, which is displayed below the slides. She said that they didn’t teach her to write speaker notes in school, which surprised me a little, because she is giving live presentations, not just turning in completed slide decks.

I use speaker notes extensively because I prefer to script my talks and revise the scripts as I rehearse them out loud. That process helps me cover my points in as few words as possible. It also helps me fit the words to my mouth, which is how I describe editing my text to sound more natural when I say it.

By the time I’m done, I have practically memorized the script, so I do not have to read it, and it feels very natural to say what I have prepared. That method requires writing skills that are beyond the fourth grade level, I’m afraid, but hopefully my daughter will be ready to learn how I do it someday.

I have been writing for an hour and forty five minutes tonight and have come up with, maybe, one paragraph of useful text for the Big Data/Data Calls article I am writing for work. I am not blocked. I am not distracted. I am pushing sentences around like a kid pushing peas around on a plate. The right way to connect my ideas and my sentences together is just not coming. Time to bail—at least for tonight.

One of my coworkers called me today and, before talking about business, he praised me for my presentation skills, based on presentations I gave weeks ago. 😊

Writing for three hours at night sure makes me hungry. It’s nearly 11 PM. Do I risk eating a snack so late? How could I even avoid it?

Looking back on last week, I played a lot of video games. A lot more than usual actually. It’s a sort of thing I do when my brain is so tired I can’t do anything else, not even focus on a TV show. I have been working really hard writing system walkthroughs or performing data analysis during the day, and working on a presentation and an article for publication in my company’s newsletter during the evenings. I realized that I have been staving off mental exhaustion by escaping into the world of Pokémon or Metroid in the late night hours before I go to bed. This might keep happening for the next few weeks. It is an absolute sprint for me until December 3, I’m afraid. At least at the end of the year we get the last week off.

My daughter got her first COVID-19 vaccine today. I am grateful that she will be fully vaccinated relatively soon. I think my 4-year-old son will have to wait until his fifth birthday to get the jab.

I’m working on an article for my company newsletter right now, and it feels like I am just pushing words back and forth and nothing is gelling together. I write, I delete, I move things around, and my word count stays the same, and each section remains unpublishable.

It is Election Day today in New Jersey. Everyone in my family voted early, by mail (as it should be), so there’s nothing to do but wait until evening when the results start rolling in. I’m hoping that Phil Murphy wins re-election, and that we don’t have a repeat of the 2009 gubernatorial race. The year after Obama won the White House, Republican Chris Christie was voted in as our governor. His disdain of funding schools and infrastructure set our state back for his entire tenure. I’m not ready to go through that again.

I carved a happy jack o’lantern this Halloween.

Double chocolate cupcakes for Halloween.

🎃 Lots to do today for Halloween! We’re making cupcakes (my kids can’t eat much candy due to allergies), chili, and cornbread for a family party, and we’re trick-or-treating, too.

A vaccination, blood test, and an MRI all in one 24-hour period was too much for me. 😮‍💨

Today I watched some videos from Great Art Explained on YouTube. The videos on Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights are fascinating. Watching them have me some serious flashbacks to my art history class in college.

I just got my Moderna booster shot. They are in such demand that CVS called me and asked me to come in three hours early to get it.

I have completed the New York Times crossword puzzle every day for years, but for some reason I stopped about a month ago. I have been having trouble getting back into it, too. Too many lousy puzzles turned me off.

I have been working all evening on my InsurTech presentation and totally blew through my self-imposed blogging deadline. No worries. My mind was engaged and my time was well spent.

I mailed in my request for a mail-in ballot for all future elections. (My state has an off-year election cycle for state-wide offices, so this is timely.) I did not do so before because I had thought it would be better to take my kids to the polls to show how voting works. I realized that I can also do that from home. Really, we should all be voting by mail. It would expand the franchise, and give us more time to consider the down-ballot candidates, like school board members, who are not covered by the media and can have a direct affect on our lives in ways that governors and presidents cannot.

My daughter’s iPad wont take system updates because over a third of its storage space is taken up by “Other”, which I cannot delete. Hooking it up to my Mac and doing the update from the Finder is working a treat. Who knew?