When we moved back to Minnesota and started looking at houses before Jules was born, my realtor took us to a house in Fridley. I was dead against the place before we even arrived because I had mentally determined it was too close to my parents house.

I don’t know if our realtor did this on purpose or not, but he approached the house from the east (a route I wouldn’t have chosen), which showed that just down the hill is a lake.

There’s something in my lizard-brain that made me not hate the house because of its proximity to the lake and to my parents (for childcare reasons). I swallowed my pride and we bought it.

I wound up buying my parent’s canoe in hopes we’d launch on the lake nearby, but canoeing is an activity that is better with at least two people. Convincing my family to go was rare 🛶 So we sold the canoe and got two kayaks from Menards.

Those kayaks were fine, but eventually I wanted one with a couple of extra fishing features, without going to a full fishing kayak – because sometimes I like to just paddle around and sometimes I want to fish.

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This is just my experience, YMMV as they say…

In April of 2022 my VOIP home phone stopped receiving incoming calls. I could still dial out, but nobody could call the house. I received warning emails from Skyetel every 3 hours that my SIP endpoint was unreachable by their servers.

Since nothing had changed on my end, I suspected that something changed with my provider: Comcast/xfinity. Similar to my experience with British Airways, I found that xfinity has now automated everything.

I understand that automation helps if someone just needs to reboot their router, or forgot their wifi password. But for those who need genuine help getting shit done, it presents a huge barrier. It took me 9 calls and 3 trips to the xfinity store to get this resolved…

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Holy 💩 y’all – I just spent two weeks not being able to share my screen on Ubuntu. It started with a regular system update that I think updated Wayland. I noticed that my fonts in certain applications looked sharper – likely meaning that the 4k scaling was working better. Then I noticed that zoom wouldn’t share the whole screen, it would just share a portion. 😩

To be clear about my setup, I was running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with a dual monitor setup. I had been using Wayland because my XPS built-in screen is 4k and my external is standard HD (1080p).

As luck would have it, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was recently in my update queue, and I figured it couldn’t get much worse. So I upgraded, but (womp womp) it didn’t help.

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…and marching band, WGI, etc. Props for any sort of marching arts are only as good as the best “band dad” in your group. Some band dads are great engineers, but staying in budget is always the trick. Aside: that term was not (properly) defined in Urban Dictionary, so I added a definition 😎

When it comes to props, the name of the game is cheap since they’re only used for a season. But they need to last a whole season, and work consistently. Sometimes you need to solve a problem which doesn’t have an off-the-shelf solution. When structural strength is not a concern, 3D printing can help.

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If your Anki Cozmo battery if it no longer holds a charge, there’s a really good YouTube video on how to replace it.

That was the case with ours, so I watched it and want to add a couple extra pointers for those thinking of doing the same. The video has just about everything you need to do the replacement, including links to tools you may need to buy.

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