Journeys of an engineer, triathlete, and other stuff.
2025 Book Totals 15 Audiobooks 28 Kindle books 8 Tree books 51 Books total It’s been a while since I got one of these out on time (I still owe you 2022 and 2024 … don’t hold your breath), but something about having a very organized AI assistant has its perks [Ed: my clawd did almost all the work, although I did read the output] . Links to 2023 , 2021 , and 2020 . As always, in…
Recently added a pair of Rugged Radios GMR-25s to some of our farm vehicles (really like their stuff, especially for having an intercom on the tractor to be able to talk to the inevitable kiddo who’s riding with me), and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to set specific GMRS tone codes (to minimize channel interference). Their support team was kind enough to share these…
2023 Book Totals 4 Audiobooks 11 Kindle books 8 Tree books 23 Books total Well, I totally missed 2022’s book report, which seems about right for 2023 .. maybe I’ll finish it one of these days. Links to 2021 and 2020 . Anyway, here are the top books on my list, and yet again, in no particular order. (as always, affiliate links to the books get donated to charity every year … currently to my kids’…
2021 Book Totals 17 audiobooks 17 Kindle books 7 tree books 41 books total Clearly dad-, startup-, and farm-life cut into my reading time this year, and continued the shift towards more audio content (during travel, workouts, and chores). I also experimented with mostly-dictated notes for this post this year, with only very light editing, so if it reads a bit funny, that’s why. Hopefully the…
This is normally a January or February thing…last year it was November, so May seems fitting in 2021. You can find the last few years here and here … 2020 book totals: 23 audio books 14 Kindle books 10 tree books 47 books total I shifted a lot more of my reading this year to audiobooks, which I think is a combination of the baby (a lot of time that I could use my ears, but not my…
A *very* late continuation of my annual tradition … finally got a push to finish this in case you’re looking for book ideas while we find ourselves with plenty of extra time during quarantine. I read a little less in 2019, maybe because I’m working on something new (and have a new kid) or maybe just because I’m getting lazy as I get older? 48 books total, of which 4 were tree books and 23 were…
I read 54 books this year (3 of them were repeats including Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire ). 9 of them were audio books (go Audible ) and 10 were actual tree-books (largely thanks to some older books that are out-of-print hand-me-downs from friends that haven’t yet been digitized). Going through my full list there were, as usual, a lot of “practical” books this year … in the past that…
In what might be becoming an annual tradition , I thought I’d write a quick recap of the books I read in 2017. Surprisingly given my increase in discretionary time last year, my reading pace actually went down (in 2016 I read or listened to 48 books, and in 2017 it was only 40 books). The breakdown was 6 books on Audible (including one that I’d read on paper before), only 1 “tree-book”, and the…
TL;DR this is going to be really, really long as I attempt to cover months of race prep, gear selection, travel to western China, gear replacement, the race, the people, and the lessons…so be warned. The summary is this: three of us (Mark Gilbert, Angela Zäh, and I) trained (not enough), traveled to the Gobi Desert in far western China (losing only one bag of gear in the process), and ran…
I just got back from the Gobi March and writing up my race report … it got so long that I broke it up into the race and the gear, so here’s the gear. You can find the whole race report here (NOTE TO SELF: UPDATE) Mandatory Gear For the Gobi March, this was the required list (other races are obviously different, but probably a lot of similarities here). Backpack - Mark and I both carried the…
(~3500 words, 10-15min read) As I was thinking back on 2016 over the holidays, I decided to go re-read my notes from all of the books I read this year (a total of 48 books—4 audio books, 5 “tree books”, with the balance on Kindle, and 3 of them were repeat reads) and see what I had learned (or simply enjoyed) … then it seemed easy enough to write it up. Rather than a generic top-ten, I picked my…
(I’m trying out Medium so this is posted there as well) Inspired by many of Omar’s write ups and a number of questions from friends & colleagues, I thought I’d throw together a quick summary of some of my favorite travel gear. This comes from years of flying 250,000+ miles (I’m at 240,419 miles this year as I write this in December, 2016) and trying to balance lightweight + comfort. Last year for…
I distinctly remember a time at the beginning of high school when the prospect of running any distance at all, even a mile, caused nights of sleeplessness and dread. Then, like any good gateway drug (or so I’m told), it happened a little bit at a time. First, I decided I needed to get in shape for soccer season, and our British coach, Coach Wilkins, required a 3-mile warmup for every practice,…
Next in my ongoing series of posts about automating my GTD system… I’ve always been a big fan of Rands blogs about how to structure one-on-ones , but I have a confession to make. I still often have tactical 1x1s. They are rarely status meetings, and I try hard to start them all with very open-ended questions like “how are you doing?” and let them go where they may, especially if people have…
Two posts in one month … and not even a New Year’s resolution. Weird. I mentioned that I’d built a bunch of different ways to capture inputs to my productivity system in the last post, and got a number of notes & comments about it, and I’m pretty happy with them, so I figured I’d expand on that a bit. For context, I heart GTD . If you’re familiar with it, feel free to skip the next two…
(as usual, a tip of the hat to Brad Feld who got me thinking of this as a ritual with a long-lost blog post many years ago…I don’t think it was this one but it’s the closest I could find) I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about my productivity systems across the board, and how to make them better. As the company scales, as I try to scale, how do I do more stuff faster? A…
A few months ago (December 17th, to be exact), Mark Gilbert and I were sitting in a bar in San Francisco and decided that we both need to return to “a race that few could match.” It had been ten years since Mark’s first Ironman, and seven since mine … I was supposed to race my second in the fall of 2010, but a small motorcycle wreck prevented that and a few other things, and ever since, a return…
It’s been over a month, so I’m a bit behind on my race report, but wanted to recap this before I forgot everything. If you want TL;DR, skip to the end for all the ways that running an ultra-marathon is like starting a company. :) September 13th, 2014 would be my third ultra-marathon in as many weeks (also the third of my life), and it started cold and a little dark. This had all…
[this is long and somewhat rambling … read if you want, skip if you want :) ] Years ago, I saw the announcement for the first Mallorca 70.3 in an Outside Magazine, and decided I wanted to race it someday … this year, it’s fourth, turned out to be that year. Looking for a 70.3 to force myself to start getting back into distance shape after my wreck , I remembered Mallorca and…
Since I posted my OKRs for the year (ish) in January, I figured I should probably give myself a report card. At work (which I didn’t post here), we did pretty well – an average score of 0.84. I’ll take it, and we’re going to up the stakes a bit this quarter and stretch farther. On the personal side, while I feel pretty good about the quarter, the numbers aren’t quite…