Now - April 2023: Planning a Disneyland Trip, Jedi: Survivor & More

🆕 What's New?

• My wife and I are planning our first trip to Disneyland, California, for our 5th anniversary. We are huge Disney fans; we went to Disneyland Paris on our honeymoon. Our goal is to go to all Disney parks! Expect a photo blog of the trip!
• My home office setup got featured in the Workspaces.xyz newsletter; take a look.
• The big 30s are coming, and I'm anxious; I guess it's normal.
• I submitted one of my shortcuts for the first time to MacStories's Automation April contest. Check it out here.
• At work, I'm enjoying my new leadership role and having more manager-style tasks; I'm so grateful to have such fantastic designers on my team; it makes it worth it.
• Our dog Max’s knee is doing better, and is now running again around the house as usual!

🚧 This Website

It's been a blast finally having my website up and being able to blog! I'm trying to find the perfect balance between working on optimization and new features for the website and working on writing for the blog. You can check out my full Changelog, which I keep in notion for now, but here are a few highlights:

• Created a newsletter as an alternative to RSS using Buttondown. For now, it is just a URL that takes people to my button link page to subscribe, but I'm wondering if I should do it natively. I don't want to spend too much designing and coding my email template, so I'm using Audienceful to create and send the emails.
• Added analytics to the site to determine which blogs have more traction. I went with Nocodelytics because its free tier is perfect for me. Also, it allows me to track clicks on elements by adding an #id. I used to track how many people clicked on my RSS link.

📱 Apps I'm Trying

• Pixelmator Pro: I'm giving this a try to edit pics for my blog instead of Lightroom and Photoshop So far, it feels more snappy, and the matching temperature feature is super cool.
• Typinator: I keep looking for a replacement for Text Expander because I don't want to pay yet another subscription. So far Typenators UI has been terrible, and I'm considering not upgrading.
• Up Ahead: I'm so happy I discovered this app; I've been looking for a countdown app with shortcut support and amazing widgets. This does the trick!
• Bear: They recently released their new Beta of Bear 2, so I'm trying it instead of Obsidian for markdown edits before publishing it to my blog.
• Wealthfront: After following advice from Ramit Sethi's book, I finally opened a Roth Ira with Wealthfront; the process was easy, and the app's UI was great. Let's see how it goes.

📺 Watching

• Abbot Elementary: Omg, I loved this show so much! Some workplace comedies are too clingy for me, but this one is perfect, and the cast is fantastic. Ava and Mr. Johnson are my favorite characters so far. I love how they reference jokes from prev episodes
• Ted Lasso Season 3: This season feels very different from others but in a good way. Every episode brings such joy that we don't want it to end!
• Mandalorian Season 3: I had a lot of fun watching it as super duper star wars nerd, but the season was messy story-wise. My biggest gripe is that many moments that were supposed to be huge fell flat for me.
• Not Dead Yet: I can see this one getting canceled, tbh. It's just not funny, and the core gimmick of the show does not add much to the plot. The cast is top-notch.
• How I Met Your Father: Season 2 is better than Season 1; we finally laugh, but it's not near the level of How I Met Your Mother yet.
• I tried watching Succession, but I am starting not to like shows where everyone is horrible.

🧱 Building

I'm looking forward to Lego's new May sets, which include two new diorama-style sets. Until then, I’ve been having a lot of fun building Lego houses from different movies.

• Privet Drive (Harry Potter House) & Lego Up House
• Dagobah Jedi Training Diorama

🎮 Playing

• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor: WOW. I started the game yesterday, and it’s better than I expected. Looks stunning, and the gameplay feels improved
• Hogwarts Legacy: Almost there with the main story. I'm having much fun getting distracted by the beautiful open world.

📲⌚️ Lock Screen & Home Screens

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