Skit Skat Skoodle Doot

Tomorrow I’ll post pictures from our Mother’s Day trip to the winery, but for now here’s an oops video

Don’t worry, the boot was returned unharmed.

Android Wear has some really customizable watch faces.  My initial favorite was InstaWeather, because it gave me at a quick glance all the information on upcoming weather for the rest of the day.  It’s great to just glance at your watch and know that it’s warm out right now, but will be raining at dinner time.

But I had a problem with it, because the amount of data being pulled was draining my phone’s battery like crazy.  I switched to a generic digital watch face and the problem went away.

That’s good to know for times when I’m going to be away from my phone charger for extended periods, but most of time I’m within arm’s reach of one, so I’d rather let my phone drain and have the nicer features on my watch.

Now I’m using Pujie Black, which has a similar issue draining my phone’s battery, but has the advantage of being almost infinitely customizeable.  Pictured above is the configuration I’m currently running with.  It’s got the timezone in Brisbane, Australia so I know whether my teammate over there is awake, battery status, and weather.  Tapping on the weather icon opens a new screen with more detailed information too.  Tapping the center opens a panel with quick actions for controlling any music or video playing on my phone.

Here’s the view when the screen is inactive.  I originally had this screen in full-color as well, but that ended up draining the watch battery too much.  Switching to B&W solved that problem completely.

Recently I’ve started drinking this in the morning (in addition to coffee).  It’s the juice of a whole lemon, ~1tsp of edible matcha green tea powder, ice, and water.  It’s delicious, and a great energizer.

There are a ton of benefits to drinking lemon juice.  I won’t list them here, but a quick Google search returns dozens of articles about it.

The problem with being on a 35 day streak posting on this blog is that I know that if I break it I won’t get another Achievement like this for at least another month.

Oh, you thought this was going to be about another kind of streaking?  Sorry…

So I was unable to avoid catching Gia’s pink eye.  I felt it creeping in yesterday afternoon, and by the time I went to bed my eye was bright red and goopy.  This morning it was pretty well glued shut.  I’ll spare you the pictures (although I did take some good ones).

The reason I took pictures was so that I could send them to a doctor over at Teladoc, which we have access to via my insurance.  Within 5-10 minutes I created an account, had a video chat with a doctor, and had a prescription sent in to my pharmacy.  All for the same price as my copay if I’d gone into an office.  The doctor looked like she was sitting in her living room drinking coffee, which is a pretty sweet gig.

It was great!  I need to set up profiles on there for the kids, because we’re pretty frequently taking them in to the doctor for something that’s really easy to diagnose.

I really want a good VR headset.  Not because I want to play games, although I’m sure there are some good ones (or there will be soon enough), but because I want to wear it on a plane to watch movies.  Imagine sitting in your cramped airplane seat, but your mind feels like it’s sitting in a wide open theater.

Here are a couple of articles from people who’ve done it, and they both highly recommend it (although the second guy said he put his away partway into the flight out of embarrassment.  Luckily I have very little shame):
http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/27/8302453/im-the-creepy-guy-wearing-a-vr-headset-on-your-plane-and-its-great
http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-gear-vr-airplane-2016-4

They both used the Samsung GearVR, which is the cheapest “good” headset available right now.  It’s a step above Google Cardboard, but still relies on a smartphone to provide the screen and computing power.  If it worked with my phone I’d order one right now, but it only works with a small set of Samsung phones.

For my crazy-long flights to and from Australia next month I’m looking into whether it’s worth renting a compatible phone.  The cheaper option would just be to swap phones with my wife (since she has the S6, which works), but I really like my phone and hesitate to give it up for a week.  But I may decide it’s worth it.  I’ll keep you posted.

As for the headset itself, I have a friend who has one I could probably borrow, but they’re also not that expensive.  They’re $99 new, and I see a bunch on Craigslist for $50-80.

Over the weekend we went to an engagement party for some friends, and part of the festivities included a trip to Escape Room Live DC, where we were tasked with escaping an 80s-themed room by finding the hidden mix tape.  It was a ton of fun, and we were incredibly close to getting out (with only one hint along the way).  The problem was that we made it to the very last puzzle with 3 minutes left, and it was a safe with a combination lock.  No problem, we have a few guesses…except after three guesses the safe times out for 5 minutes before you can try again.  So we didn’t get it, and had to stand there for the last few minutes completely helpless.

And in case you can’t tell, I’m the dashing gentleman on the right with the blue jacket, blonde wig, and PBR cowboy hat.

I said I’d post every day in April, and I did!  The above is a screenshot from the Insights tab of the WordPress.com statistics page.  I started my job here at Automattic in September, and started my blog in October.

I’m going to leave my daily Skoodle Doot reminder active, so hopefully I’ll keep my streak going, but we’ll see.

This was the first time we got to go out in our new rain jackets and boots.