Two Beers and a Marley has become Gabz/mL ,Gabz per milliliter ? Let me explain a bit, my name is Luis Gabriel Santiago, my friends call me Gaby, some call me Gabe but others just call me Gabz (not sure why but they do)! The mL, well, it does have that scientific reference. A reference to my degree and related jobs and it’s also a “pun”, the “m” is for Marley and “L” is for Luna. Marley is our first daughter (almost 3yo now) and Luna is our second and most recent addition to the family (she’s almost 2mo old).

Hopefully this will stick! I have been playing with many ideas about the identity of this blog for a long time now. Going back and forth, specially since it has taken an entirely different direction and meaning since I moved it to Micro.blog from WP. It is a whole different concept and idea from the one I had when I first started it almost two years ago.

So, yeah, Gabz/mL it is!

• Chicken sandwich from Walmart 🥪

• Discovering The Stalman Podcast 🎙

• Getting a new fancy Shortcut (by Federico Viticci) 📱

• Delicious food at home 🥘 🏡

• Completing things at work ✅

• Album discovery

• Fun (scary) texts from the wife

• Getting a Hotdog from a coworker

• The Dent, episode 19: Are you positive?

• Robert Downey Jr’s Tweet

With Day One back in my homescreen, I also imported most of my old entries before I had deleted it. And with that I get back the “On this day” notifications. This morning I got this note from 4 years ago. I’m sure I was referencing someone else’s blog post but all I did was taking snippets and entered them in Day One. I remember it was about someone getting tested to ADD. And how his reasons for doing so totally resonated with me and made me think… Should I get tested for ADD?

I have to actively think about maintaining eye contact during a conversation, which usually leaves me unable to listen to what’s actually being said.

fidget constantly and can’t have a phone conversation without pacing all over the place.

So I’m enjoying fewer and fewer games because there are a ton of games I should enjoy “in theory” given my tastes, but my attention span cuts that off at the knees when I actually sit down to play them.

I fiddle with my phone constantly, refreshing Twitter every fifteen seconds even though I know logically that nothing’s changed (and even if it has it can’t possibly be important); knowing that something is happening and needing to know about it is such a powerful distraction that I can’t stop myself

All this points are still relevant to this day.

🎵 ‎‎Monument Valley (Original Soundtrack) by Stafford Bawler, Obfusc & Grigori

Played this album to baby Luna to get her to sleep. It totally did the trick — today that is.

Oh! Happy Three Kings Day!

Not long ago I posted about basically me deleting Day One and how I now keep a “journal”. Well, today I have installed Day One again, after listening to the Automators podcast episode #14: Automated Journaling. At one point in the show, if I recall correctly, they mentioned something about been able to automate journal entries into Day One using IFTTT. The idea is that anytime I publish something to my Micro.blog it will also create a journal entry in Day One. This idea to me, was reason enough to give Day One another run.

…blogging (microblogging now) became my way of keeping a journal

Since I have changed the way I do journaling, making automated entries without changing my workflow made sense. I created and applet in IFTTT for this purpose. And as expected, all the work it’s behind the scenes and it works perfectly (so far).

I want to thank @ronguest on Micro.blog for helping me setting this up. I cannot say enough how much I appreciate his help.

IN OTHER NEWS:

I am continuing with my photography challenge. It’s a new month, that means a new lens to use. I’ll give some kind of update soon. ;)

I have been doing some clean up in the past two days. More like trying to simplify, if you will. I guess that’s the theme for this year — Simplify.

Instagram

In an effort to make Instagram a little more enjoyable again I figured some clean/simplification might help. I went through and unfollowed a lot of accounts. Again, trying to make my time line more simple and relevant to me. However, all the adds are getting more and more annoying.

Twitter

Unfollowed, unfollowed… and more unfollows. Had to! It was long time overdue. Did some serious clean up to my timeline, again, simplifying (in a way). I realized I followed to many tech people (that complain a lot), tech news accounts, useless ones that don’t add any value.

Podcast

Too many shows around the same topics over and over. Recently I have been subscribing to some new shows that I am really enjoying that aren’t necessarily tech related and unsubscribed for many tech related ones.

Task Managers

Instead of struggling with finding the “best” one or the most suitable. I basically went back to a simple system — Reminders. I have realized that I don’t need a complex system for the few tasks I have. I just need a place to capture things, that’d be Drafts and a place with lists and notifications. So reminders works fine, although I am using GoodTask 3 : To Do List to manage my tasks/reminders.

Subscriptions

I was looking through all my subscriptions and realized that I had way too many. Specially for apps that I already have another app that does the same exact thing but without a subscription. Or subscriptions to apps that I no longer use. So I cancelled a lot of them. Some of them I’d still love to support them even if I don’t use them as regularly, but right now I need to save as much as I can. It’s is what it is, I guess.

That has been some of the changes I have been making so far. I am sure I’ll be making more changes in order to make things more simple and a little bit minimalistic.

So yeah, Simplify

IN OTHER NEWS:

I have never been so much of a Star Trek guy. So a coworker today suggested a couple of movies to watch. Will try to check them out soon.