What I Learned While Working in Barcelona for a Week Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. – Mark Twain I recently had the great pleasure to travel to Barcalona. It was a work trip, and we spent most of our time in the hotel working, but the experience gave me some important perspectives that I’d like to share here.

Intentions Recently I’ve had a lot of things pop up that remind me to continue to set intentions and to follow through on them - and that both steps are required to get results. The way to achieve anything in life is to value the goal, understand the steps required to reach the goal, and the consistent pursuit of it. It’s as easy and as difficult as that.

What’s Wrong With That This week, I participated with members of my management cohort in a retrospective of a training course we took on sharing feedback. What struck me the most about our discussion was how we took the idea of giving feedback from a one-way communication to one that is more… human. Giving someone feedback can be tricky. Receiving it can be too. Putting thought into how someone else may feel, and how best to prepare to have a meaningful conversation is at least as important as what you’ve got to say.

It’s the Simple Things The best times don’t cost much money, just a bit of our time. Think about the best times of your life and I bet they will involve moments with people you love. For me, that’s been time in the kitchen with my mother, grandma, partners, sister, nieces, and nephews. There have been many moments with smiles, laughs, and love. Other moments would be fishing with my father, going to the Dam store with my grandpa or uncles, or just listening to their stories of a rowdy childhod.

Learning Project: Securing Remote Access to Home Network I had a recent need to update the Raspberry Pi running Cloudflare tunnels to the edge of my home and camera networks. I figured I might as well use the opportunity to run services in containers, and get some hands on experience with Docker. I also figured that I’d run the Pi-hole DNS black hole and ad blocker too. I anticipated that I’d learn how to: