Author: Scott Stancil

I’ve seen a lot of action movies in my life.  So many that I’ve always had the thought in the back of my mind that if I was attacked I’d not only be able to defend myself, but I’d suddenly be Jason Bourne and leave the bad guys lying unconscious on the ground.  On the surface I know that’s completely untrue, and if I was actually being mugged I’d be too scared to think about anything else.  But my subconscious disagrees.

I used to drive past the Krav Maga Northern Virginia facility on my way home from work, so off and on over the last few years I’ve thought about signing up.  The other day I finally looked into it, and found out they offer a free trial class to start.  So I bit the bullet and went today.  It was really good.  The class was for all levels, so there were people of all skillsets from another first-timer up to guys who’ve been doing it for years.

We started with a generic warmup, which almost wore me out by itself, and then went right into some drills.  First we were grabbing each others’ shoulders and delivering hard knees to the mid-section (holding a pad), but then we got into the more interesting work.  The scenario we were playing out was being grabbed around the neck from behind and either dragged or thrown to the ground.  We went through a variety of escapes and counter-attacks and drilled them over and over.  The whole class was an hour long, but it felt like no time at all.  Although I did come out of it with rug burns on my knees and some bruises on my neck that I’m glad I don’t have to explain to anyone.

I won’t be able to make it back to another class this week because of some prior engagements, but I do plan on signing up for real next week, and at least going on Mondays and Wednesdays.  That’s when their mid-day classes are scheduled, so I can just arrange my work day around it and not have to worry about missing dinner time with the family.

P.S. – The image at the top of the post is from https://stocksnap.io, where you can get free open-license images.  I don’t even have to attribute it to them, but I want to.  They actually did have a good picture of some MMA fighters that would fit better with Krav Maga, but I like the little karate guy.

I got a cheap refurbished LG G Watch on Woot the other day.  It’s probably the lowest-end Android Wear watch available, which means it was a pretty low investment for me to see if I like the platform well enough to buy one of the nicer ones.

And of course I can’t give up my FitBit, so it’s been moved over to my other wrist.  We’ll see how it goes.  Worst case I think I can sell the LG watch for close to what I paid for it.

Also, do you know how hard it is to take a picture of both of your hands?  The picture is all out of focus, but at least it’s relatively centered.

Yesterday afternoon I was having trouble focusing on work at home, so I went to Peet’s Coffee & Tea to get out of the house.  It’s one of my favorite spots to go work, because there’s always enough seating, and the coffee is good.  Better than Starbucks on both counts.  But after I ordered my normal regular black coffee I noticed on the menu that you can get it in a press pot.  So today I came back to Peet’s, and ordered the large coffee you see above.   I probably should’ve gotten a small…that’s a lot of coffee for one person to drink.  Especially since I’m uncomfortable leaving my stuff at the table while I go to the bathroom.

I’m actually at a different Peet’s today than I was yesterday too.  I ended up having to do part of the daycare dropoff this morning (usually Jen takes care of it), so I was going to just go to the Starbucks near there since it’s the most convenient.  But I looked in the window as I drove past, and it looked like all the seats were taken.  So I was going to just go to the same spot I was at yesterday, but I decided to check Google Maps just to make sure there wasn’t another option nearby I hadn’t seen yet.  Turns out they have a (new?) filter available for just Coffee + WiFi, which is exactly what I was looking for.  There was a place called Sakasa Tea & Coffee just a few minutes away.  I was amazed I’d never heard of it!  So I drove over, and ended up in the middle of a residential neighborhood.  Either somebody was running a coffee shop out of their house, or Google Maps was wrong.  But at this point I was already halfway to the Burke Peet’s, so I just drove over here.  It’s nice!  And just down the street from a library, which is where I’ll go when I get tired of sitting here.

P.S. – You can’t really see in the picture, but it’s raining cats and dogs outside.  They have some nice covered seating out there…if it was a little warmer out it would actually be really nice to go sit there and watch/listen to the rain.

I’ve said it before, but I first heard about Automattic from Matt Mullenweg’s interview on the Tim Ferris podcast.  But a new job wasn’t the only thing that I got out of that interview, I also picked up a stellar productivity tip.  When Matt’s really in the groove working on a problem, he just plays a single song on loop.  I’ve been doing that too, and it’s great.  There’s no urge to switch screens to look at the playlist or skip songs, it just fades to the background and lets you focus on work.

Obviously you can’t do this with just any song…you have to find one that speaks to you.  For a long time my song of choice was Possession by Evans Blue (which currently has 817 listens recorded on Google Music for me), but the last few days I’ve been looping Love Remains by Red Wanting Blue (just 60 listens so far).

On a related note, the lead singer of Red Wanting Blue (pictured above) has a great moustache, which I think I could pull off.  Thoughts?

In pursuit of a low carb/high fat diet, I made these out of coconut oil, bakers chocolate, and almond butter.  Clockwise from the top it’s The Thing, The Hulk(‘s fist), Iron Man, and Captain America’s shield.

http://ketodietapp.com/Blog/post/2013/04/20/Looking-for-a-Great-No-carb-Snack-Try-Chocolate-Coconut-Candies

GIFs are very popular right now…so much so that I’d rather take twenty pictures and turn them into a GIF (which Google Photos does automatically) than record a video.  Are we going to look back in ten years and realize how silly that really is? 

#deepthoughts