Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Hats off to DNSimple’s contact form for support. It includes a dropdown of accounts you are logged into. Being able to select an account makes contacting them much easier and narrows down the location of the reported issue. This is a simple but effective way to improve customer feedback.

My initial experience with Kamal hasn’t been great. At the start of the year, I spent a few days at best with it, but I kept running into issues, which eventually got forgotten. I’m restarting again with Kamal, as I feel it could be of real benefit in hosting my own apps.

I missed some glorious golfing weather over the weekend as I finished painting the hall. With that done, all our major home decorating plans are complete, and I can enjoy the outdoors and golf until around October.

I’m starting to come round to the idea of replacing my Kindle with a Kobo.

Picked up a couple more of these notebooks from Atoms to Astronauts.

Good quality paper and the covers are superb. Picked up the astronomy and geology notebooks this time.

They’re catching on in the Lang household as my youngest asked for a couple as well.

Two science-themed notebooks, one featuring a geological design and the other with planetary orbits, are titled "Atoms to Astronauts Science Notebooks."

The quest for more offline reading continues with the first edition of my Wired subscription.

A Wired magazine cover features a theme of money with an altered credit card design and the text "It's a Rich Man's World."

Spring, the planning season

A recent trend in my RSS feeds and newsletters is that March is a month for preparing and planning and is the start of a seasonal way of implementing those plans.

Seth Godin recently blogged about March being the strategy month.

But March? Around the world, March can be a chance to get down to the work we committed to do.

Invest 31 days into outlining, discussing and fleshing out the strategy you want to bring to your career or your project. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.

Mike Vardy also wrote in his newsletter that if you feel left behind, don’t worry.

If you’ve been feeling behind, let me be clear: you’re not behind—you’re right on time. This is your moment to decide—what do you want this year to really be about?

Finally, Austin Kleon also discussed living seasonally in his newsletter. Now is the time to plant those ideas for the year ahead. Austin Kleon’s newsletter got me thinking about how March is the month for starting a new one—not with resolutions, but with plans.

New Year’s resolutions used to be a thing for me, but I never saw them through. I would get a few weeks in every year, and my resolutions would fall by the wayside. After a time, I gave up on the notion that January would be the start of something new.

The problem with resolutions is that they are decisions that are attempted at the change of a day, and they are made when most of us are getting over the last of the holidays. It can be challenging to make adjustments and see decisions through. You need more time to prepare and see those decisions through.

March is traditionally a time for planting in the garden. Just last weekend, we started planting our tomato and chilli seeds. Next weekend, we’ll look to start planting flowers and herbs. I also have some plans to put a permanent greenhouse in the garden instead of the plastic ones I have been using.

Next weekend, I will start building a base for the greenhouse to sit on, and hopefully, by April, I’ll have a more permanent place for growing through the summer.

While our plans for the garden will take time, they will yield results with time and care throughout the summer and into the autumn.

I’ve got other plans for this year outside of the garden. These plans will take time, but using the year’s seasons is a better way of planning for the year ahead. I will use the next few months to get some plans in place, both for in and outside the garden.

I finished reading Dust, the last of the Silo series by Hugh Howey.

I thoroughly enjoyed the books. It’s also good to finally have finished a series of books, as it’s been a while since I’ve done that.

The wee yin had a good lesson today working on his short game. I hope he remembers it all for tomorrow when he plays his winter knockout tie.

A person is swinging a golf club on a grassy golf course with trees in the background.