Hung out with Lisa Kurt and a few members of Reno Collective today to see Lisa’s latest show Somewhere in the Desert There’s a Forest.

Lisa does amazing work. I loved all of the illustrations/paintings in the gallery space today. I only wish I could afford to purchase a piece from her. It was also great talking to Lisa and hearing about her art process. I haven’t spoken with her in years. She seems to be doing really well.

The show is coming down soon so if you want to check it out you need to get there right away.

http://sierra-arts.org/exhibit/somewhere-desert-theres-forest/

This watch was on Kickstarter and could have been purchased for under $150. It’s now $300 and I missed my opportunity to fund it. All well. I’ll pick it up later at full price when I start getting back to work full-time.

This Undone wrist watch is really nice. It even has a clear back to see the movement inside. My only wish is that it has a Day Date complication. I think I would like that more than the chrono.

The Killy face version is really cool and vintage. Here I have the Portu face that is less busy. I might have to buy two because I love both designs. I think this black design and then the lighter color design. At $300 each it’s still a great deal for a really nice watch.

They have a customizer feature on their website that allows you to configure the watch to your tastes. That’s what I used to build this photo. But with choices comes hard decisions. Well, maybe in April when they start shipping I will be able to afford one. We will see.

Moved my chopper over to Tony’s new house to start tearing it down and rebuilding it.

I’m going to have the frame re-power coated black chrome. Then I’m going to chrome some of the parts like the bars and sissybar. Next I’m going to repaint the tank and fender so they look way cooler. Bare metal with black skulls on it. It will be bad ass.

Then when that’s all done I’m going to put it all back together using rubber mounts and leather pushing so it doesn’t vibrate everything apart so bad. Going to up the front sprocket to like a 25 or 30 tooth. That will keep the RPM’s down and the vibrations low. Can’t wait to get back on the road with it.

I pass this car almost daily as I leave the neighborhood. I love this car. I want this car so bad. It just sits there and never moves. I don’t know if it runs or if it’s for sale or anything. Someday I’ll stop and ask about it.

I had the Nexus 5 and absolutely loved it. One day I dropped it and it broke inside. I could no longer use LTE with it. So I upgraded to the Nexus 5x.

Right off I didn’t like the 5x as well. It seemed slower and jerky. I did like the fingerprint sensor and the ability to unlock my phone with it. But overall I didn’t really like the phone. I upgraded the 5x to Android 7.1.1 and that fixed all the slowness issues I was having. It made the phone a lot better.

I then upgraded to the Pixel XL and Project Fi. I wanted to try Google’s new phone service. It was also a bit cheaper than the AT&T service I was using. I was also ready to go up to a larger phone. I had a hard time choosing between the 6p and the Pixel XL. Finally the longer lasting battery, the faster CPU, and the great camera won me over. I kinda wish it had a larger screen for reading books on but this will do. So far I’m loving the new phone. I know it’s not the best but I am still pretty happy with it.

I’ll chime in again in the future to let you know how it all worked out.

I like watches. I think I’m going to continue getting them and have a nice little collection. This is just a cheapie watch, but I like it.

PS, I have found the ticking of this watch is really soothing. I just love hearing the seconds tick away on it.

Found an awesome article on G+ the other day about from John Washam who wanted to get a job at Google. He studied for eight months full-time and recorded all his study material on Github. It’s very inspiring and I want to do the same thing.

I started this course work today. Going to skip some of it so I don’t have to spend eight months learning as he recommends. Hope to finish in a month or two while doing it full-time. There is already a lot of things that I didn’t know about but wanted to know and never learned. A lot of things my friend Dave would always hint to me about learning. I’m going to do this.

Cheers to becoming a better programmer!

Ordered a new laptop. It’s a fully loaded Dell Precision Workstation 5510.

Got the upgraded Xeon processor and 32GB of RAM on it too. It’s pretty sweet. So fast!

It’s a lot bigger than my old XPS 13. I didn’t want to go bigger in size but to get something with 32GB of RAM meant that I had to get this form factor. I do like the larger screen though. Wish it had more pixels. I didn’t get the touch screen so I’m stuck with just 1080 HD, but it’s fine for what I’m doing with it. Just writing code and surfing the internet.

First thing I did was install Fedora 24 on it. Dumped the Ubuntu because it sucks. I’ve really come to like Fedora Linux. Haven’t had a single break since I went to this distro. Also, the software is very up to date. Their default desktop is Gnome Shell and that’s what I prefer to use anyway.

I’ll chime in later in the year and let you know how it’s going.