- Life
- Still nomading and house sitting around the Bay Area, and it’s funny how proud we feel every time we tell someone that.
- Cloverdale, on the border of Sonoma and Mendocino, taking care of Xobee, a very funny basset hound. The owners lent us their car, so we did some short trips around the area, including a visit to the Francis Ford Coppola winery.
- A few days in Marin City with Forrest, a super sweet dog, in a tiny apartment with no wifi and a huge view. We spent the days walking and reading books (apparently that’s what people did before wifi).
- We booked the train from SF to Chicago for September, as a little celebration of a good year so far.
- I’m officially a multifocal lens user now, which is the polite way of saying old folk. The good news is that I can read the menu again without holding it at arm’s length.
- Work
- Namecheap went down one too many times (diego.horse was offline for more than 6 hours), so I started moving all my sites off WordPress to plain static pages. You’re reading the result, and I feel so relieved.
- Bird Rise experiments, every week. My favorite learning of the month is that showing people a demo of the alarm before the paywall made things worse, not better. Now I’m testing letting people choose their wake up challenge instead.
- Finally recorded a new batch of ad videos, which I had been postponing for way too long.
- Started refactoring Memo Rise, which is turning into a mix of habit tracker and alarm with personalized messages. I’m really excited about this one.
- More little games. B.O.W.E.L.S went to Reddit and Product Hunt, and I shipped In Bird Years and an endless bird jigsaw, which didn’t get much attention on itch, so the marketing homework is on me.
- Apple rejected 2048 Rare Birds as spam, saying there are too many games like it (fair). I’m giving it a second chance with a new name, and BirDJ, my most played game on itch, is getting an iOS version too.
- Relaxing
- Concerts! Tune-Yards and Violent Femmes, and Patti LaBelle at Stern Grove.
- Friday nights at OMCA (the Oakland Museum) are soo cool. We had a picnic there and watched a Korean hip hop concert.
- A Saturday morning at a cemetery looking for Elizabeth Short’s grave, which is a normal weekend activity for us, I guess.
- Found out Wandrer has an iOS app in beta, which saved me from building my own (I was seriously considering it).
- Exercise
- Better than July. In Cloverdale I ran around 30% of the city streets with Wandrer, which turns running into a little Pac Man game of eating the red lines on the map. It also led me into a dead end at 9pm with a small crowd waiting at the gate, but that’s a story for another post.
- Morning runs beat evening runs, by far.
- Marin City was perfect for long runs, and I barely did any 🙁
