Weekly Thing #171 / Earthrise, Firecracker, Rivian
I’m Jamie Thingelstad. You’re getting this email because you signed up for the Weekly Thing. I appreciate you being here, but if you don’t want these emails any longer, simply unsubscribe.
I’m going to keep things super short this week. We are scrambling getting things packed up as we head to Mesa, Arizona for February. We decided with the kids doing distance learning and me working remote to try a change of latitude this year. We are packing the Honda Pilot full of stuff and tomorrow morning will be heading out with Lucky going on the ride as well. We have two 12 hour days of driving ahead. 😳
Now I have to get back to packing and will share more on our February adventure as we go! 🚙
“Character is greater than 140 characters.” — Hector Fernandez
Must Read
The Revenge Of Retail - AVC
I’ve followed Fred Wilson’s blog for years and I was curious what he thought about the crazy stuff happening with GameStop. He’s more generous than I would have expected.
The new hedge fund is the Robinhood army self organizing on Reddit. They can move a stock more easily than the largest hedge fund.
There will be calls to regulate this “madness.” But it is the same madness we have always had. It is just a different crowd in charge.
I have a hard time thinking of this as a “changing of the guard” moment. Nor do I really think of this as “retail” investors.
In my head I think we’ve always had investors (which Fred self-describes as) and traders. Those two groups work symbiotically in the market. This new thing that we are seeing with highly speculative, or even “gamed” assets, is something very different. I think it is best described as “betters’. So, what does it mean when the world of investors and traders has this new group of betters come in. No one knows, and I guess we will see.
Brené on Words, Actions, Dehumanization, and Accountability | Brené Brown
I found this to be a powerful message and it made me think about how language is used to classify people and hurt them. This was published shortly after the Capitol Riots and the emotions are fresh. I highly recommend giving this a focused listen.
We have this blackboard in our house that Mazie usually updates with the happenings of the month. This month has been about our upcoming trip to Arizona! 🌵
Fit By Fifty
I hit my cycling workouts, but you’ll notice strength is empty. Stay tuned for February, the Month of Strength!
Workouts
Trying a table for this this week. The first number is minutes and the kcal is in paranthesis.
| Workout | Fri | Sat | Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cycling | 30 (556) | 30 (590) | 30 (473) | ||||
| Strength | |||||||
| Walking | 55 (392) | 38 (232) | 33 (198) |
Recommended Links
Customer Success: Why Big Teams Need a Small-Size Approach | LinkedIn
Karin Lucas of SPS sharing her thoughts on scaling your customer success organization and retaining the customer focus and intimacy you get naturally in smaller teams. I love the reference to Dunbar’s number and am a firm believer in that aspect of groups.
SPS Technology - SPS team members share their learnings from the Grace Hopper Celebration
Great sharing session headed up by our SPS Women in Tech group with information from the Grace Hopper Celebration 2020 event. Love that the group is sharing this broadly as well. 👏
Earthrise: A Poem About Climate Change by Amanda Gorman
Continuing the Amanda Gorman fandom here is another great poem from her.
Rivian raises $2.65B as it pushes toward production of its electric pickup | TechCrunch
We all watched the Long Way Up recently and Rivian trucks are prominently in it. They seemed pretty amazing, enough that Tammy was actually thinking she might want a Rivian. We are going to keep an eye on their progress. ⚡️🛻
Airstream Portable Parks | America’s Most Majestic Outdoor Places, Virtually
There are some amazing video fly overs of National Parks here that I just love. I instantly wanted to take some and slow them way down to use as Zoom backgrounds. I’m playing them right now in another window just taking in the scenery. The marketing is working, this stuff makes me want to buy an Airstream. 😋 Via Tom Mungavan.
A Home Security Tech Hacked Into Cameras To Watch People Undressing And Having Sex, Prosecutors Say
This is disgusting and gross and just yuck. This is worth reading though just to think about how this shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
- I would really challenge anyone that you need or want a camera connected to the Internet pointing inside your house. I have Dropcams and they are in the house, but they point out windows and I have the microphones disabled. This is the most I will allow.
- ADT’s app should have asked users every few months to confirm the people that it is sharing data with. Simple enough.
- ADT should have had a check on their side to see if one account ever had access to more than a certain number of cameras and accounts.
This is a simple thing that this tech did, and it is easy to stop this type of thing, but you have to first understand it could happen and take our role as technologists more seriously to protect people from bad actors.
Concepts of Hugo | ΔY
I find Hugo a bit confusing and this is a good walk through of how it’s templating system works. I don’t run Hugo directly, but I use micro.blog and it uses Hugo to render the sites.
Hush – Noiseless Browsing for Safari
I already use 1Blocker which does most everything this does and more, but if you are looking for a content blocker to make your experience on the web better this looks like a great option!
Firecracker: start a VM in less than a second
This tech is really interesting and the ability to launch a full virtual machine in a second allows for some really interesting use cases.
Being Chief Technology Officer: Lessons learned in my first year – Shekhar Gulati
Gulati’s path to becoming CTO is atypical in that he wasn’t a people manager before. The article shows an engineer → architect → CTO path. I like how he reflected on how he approached the role and the things he learned. His lessons learned are worthwhile for anyone in a leadership role.
Cloudflare Waiting Room
This sounds like a boring thing, but it caught my eye and the idea is kind of cool. A very highly scalable waiting room to put those waiting to get to your website. Completely hosted on another set of infrastructure. Neat idea.
Tough love for managers who need to give feedback | Lara Hogan
For people managers this is a particularly common time to be writing performance reviews. This ‘tough love’ from Lara Hogan is a good framing on how to approach giving feedback.
Journal
We played Exploding Kittens for first time tonight. Silly game but quick and fun.
I love geeking out on all the AV gear when recording. This setup was great!
Bring Back Inline Replies
The vast majority of the email I reply to I do a simple top reply. Particularly on mobile. It is fast and simple.
However, I have started replying to friends and family with longer inline replies. It feels sort of old fashioned, like I’m writing a letter. It puts me in a context to write more thoughtfully. If you haven’t tried inline replies lately, with nice formatting and trimming of the note you are replying to, give it a go. ✍️
I 💛 micro.blog
I noticed that it was four years ago today that I signed up to back Indie Microblogging on Kickstarter. Micro.blog has evolved so much since launch and has firmly taken the place as my favorite blogging platform.
Micro.blog removes the friction from publishing, and is deceptively powerful. I’ve consolidated over 15 years of blogging across a few different systems into micro.blog. I have thousands of posts and it continues to be a delight to use. It strikes the perfect compromise of power and ease-of-use. It is the easiest way I know to get a photo on the web.
I’m amazed at what has been created, and I continue to be excited about the improvements being made. If you are looking for a home on the web, I would strongly endorse micro.blog.
Better Weekly Thing Description
Writing to describe myself or one of my projects is hard for me. Those little “About” boxes all over profile pages on the web fill me with dread. For the Weekly Thing having a strong description is critical and I knew it needed improvement. I found Josh Spector’s Five-Day Plan to Grow Your Newsletter and his first item was to improve your description. I liked his framework so gave it a go.
This is what I started with.
The Weekly Thing is a weekly newsletter highlighting helpful, interesting, or insightful articles from the week. I am a voracious reader of technology, culture, leadership, privacy, and many other topics as my interests roam. Each article I share is framed with personal commentary combining my decades of experiences. My goal is to positively impact your journey with knowledge and insight.
It is certainly accurate, but I didn’t love it. I don’t think it represented what you actually got by subscribing. It didn’t even include my name.
I wanted to make sure that it
- included a solid description of what you would expect to get
- included my name so you know who it came from
- included some validation points like quotes and subscriber count
- referenced that I include more than just links
I took Spector’s framework as a starter and then worked it over and over. This is what I finished with.
Join over 1,000 subscribers to the Weekly Thing by Jamie Thingelstad!
Each Saturday morning, you will get my thoughts on technology, leadership, productivity, culture, privacy, and anything else interesting. I add commentary combining my decades of experience leading teams and building technology. I also include my personal writing, what I’m currently into, and a photograph of the week. There is even a fortune at the end! 🥠
A friend once described the Weekly Thing as a “direct feed from Jamie’s brain.” 🧠 There are no ads, your email will never be shared, your privacy will be protected, and it is free.
Subscribe now and positively impact your journey with knowledge, insight, and perspective!
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I took the time to run the confirmation email, where this same text is included, through Mail Tester. The previous message was too short and was being heavily penalized by spam tools. The new length and text scored a perfect 10/10 score. For newsletter authors this is an important thing to get right!
I’m not A/B testing and I don’t use surveillance tools on my signup page but I should still be able to see if signups increase, and very important if the number of unconfirmed subscribers, that seem to never get the confirmation email, drops.
Snowy trail taking Lucky for a walk.
The kids thinking about summer on the frozen pool. 🥶😊
The new Good Day Coffee in Faribault has some incredibly good pie! Recommended if you are in the area.
FYI
Apple Reports First Quarter Results - Apple
Really large revenue numbers usually make it really hard to post big percentage changes. This makes this subhead “Revenue up 21 percent and EPS up 35 percent to new all-time records” all the more incredible. These results are phenomenal.
Get Your Outlook Calendar In A Snapshot - Toggl Blog
I use Toggl to track my time, compare budget to actual for time spent, and assess my reaction to events on my calendar. I do this by running a Shortcut that works on my calendar and hits the Toggl API. This new integration with Outlook could replace my automation and make it easier to synchronize your Outlook calendar to Toggl.
Apple Unveils ‘Time to Walk’ for Fitness+ - MacStories
I haven’t used this yet but I like the stuff that is happening with Fitness+.
A Week With Plan 9 - Tales From The Dork Web
I’ve read bits about Plan 9 at various times and it sounds like such a novel operating system. This writeup is a good way to satisfy that curiosity without having to install it yourself. 😋
Fortune
Here is your fortune…
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
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About
I once created a fun travel game about identifying mathematical relationships in the numbers that appear on road signs, called Road Sign Math! I launched a website to share the signs and had 30 people submit over 250 road signs from every continent in the world!
Recent Issues
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