Daniel J Isom

When I'm at work, I tend to listen to music or podcasts. As I mentioned, I've been listening to a lot of Twenty One Pilots as of late. Sometimes I let YouTube just play the videos as they come up so occasionally a cover of their music gets mixed in. That's how I found GnuS Cello's channel . GnuS Cello is run by Stefano Cabrera , a musician who mostly plays the cello, ukele, and seagull merlin guitar. It was his instrumental of "Ride" by Twenty One Pilots that came up and I fell in love with it immediatly. I had forgotten how much I loved listening to the cello. My brother used to play when he was school and is/was incredibly talented. I hope he decides to pick it up again. Above is that cover I spoke about. Please give it a listen because Stefano is incredible. He also does covers of many other artists including: Linkin Park, Imagine Dragons, Coldplay, Sia, and a many others. I don't watch the videos every time, opting to just listen, but I do reall

I live in a neighborhood that will eventually have a Home Owner's Association (HOA) run by the residents. Because the neighborhood has not been completed yet, a management company currently runs the HOA. They, along with the developer, make and enforce the rules. As far as HOAs go, ours isn't too bad when it comes to restrictions. There are a lot of normal things like the houses have to similar colored vinyl siding, trash cans need to be kept out of sight, and you can't have trailers or boats in your driveway. Our HOA dues are dirt cheap for what we get. We currently pay $278 a YEAR for: a pool, landscaping of common spaces, entrance maintenance, plowing, and lawyer and administrative fees. I would pay $278 for the pool alone. That cost will go up a bit because of a pool attendant we've decided to keep, they turn people away who aren't from our neighborhood. In my opinion, it's worth it because outside people getting into the pool was huge problem since it o

I'm a fan of social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter . I don't use Facebook as often as I used to but I'm still posting pictures of the kids, games I've played, or foods I've made. I also use it to share political memes that sometimes lead to interesting conversation. Most of my social media time is spent on Twitter, which I joined to help spread the word of my board game publishing company when it was still a thing. I've since transitioned that account to a personal one, but most my followers and the people I follow are still very board game related. What I like about Twitter more than any other social media platform is the board game community that's been built on there and the ability to see all of the breaking news around the world. The biggest reason I gravitated towards Twitter was that there was a form of privacy from the people I deal with face to face in everyday life, like family and friends, because nobody was using it. A few of thos

This post is going to be short one but I wanted to bring your attention to a YouTube channel that I really enjoy run by Chevee Dodd . He runs a show called  The Daily Shed  which is "a YouTube series with new videos, Monday thru Friday. This is a sort of talk show… not a vlog… and in it, I discuss topics suggested by the community and then we all have fun in the comments." Each video is normally between five and ten minutes long and could be about anything. He talks about things going on in his life, shares other YouTube content to check out, shares wood working projects he's doing, talks about board games and that industry, and a whole lot of other topics. Chevee's openness to share personal stories is what really drew me in over the past few months. I used to check a video out here and there when I saw a topic that was interesting but now it's something I look forward to every weeknight. I've even gone back and watched nearly all of the episodes he

I was at a conference last week for work and it quickly devolved when it came to being interesting. It was the third conference in two weeks that I attended and this was by far the worst of them. Now I'm no artist and I don't tend to doodle very often but I had to do something to pass the time. I could have been rude, like over a third of the room, by looking at my phone but I decided to take advantage of the free pen and pad of paper I was given to do some doodling (while attempting to listen). The image at the top of this post was the third one I worked on. It came out objectively better than the first one I had done (see below), likely because I had a plan with the one above. To start I made the outline of a person and then started segmenting it off with straight lines. There are a few "errors" where I didn't follow the process I had started but I don't think that ultimately matters. I had a couple of people walk by during the break and say something li

I've been playing video games for nearly three decades. My favorite type of games are action shooters that are in first or third person like Halo, Unreal Tournament, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, etc. Over the past few years a new style of these types of games started to pop up, Battle Royal. A battle royal game takes survival, exploration and scavenging and combines those with last man standing game play.  Playerunknown's Battlegrounds or PUBG drops you (you jump out of a plane and parachute down), along with up to 99 other players, onto a single map which then slowly restricts the playing field until only one player remains. PUBG is not the first of its kind, but its rise in popularity put it at the forefront. Another popular game, Fortnite , has surpassed it in both popularity and revenue due to its free to play feature. Not to be outdone, PUBG launched the mobile version of the game that is also free to download and play. After seeing many tweets about it, I decided to giv

A third of the year is over and I'm still chugging along on these resolutions. April was the make or break month to find some balance. About half way through the month everything started to click. The hard work now is maintaining the balance that I was able to achieve; every single month for the rest of the year. 1) Bake more bread from scratch I picked up where I left off from the March update and decided to make a braided loaf in April. One of my favorite bread baking books,  Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day , has a recipe for Challah so I decided to make that first. I've never made a sweet bread that required rising like a traditional dough so doing that and then having to braid it were both new to me. Most of the recipes in the book yield 4 one pound loaves but a lot of the time I make 2 two pound loaves or 1 large four pound loaf. Since I'd never worked with a sweet dough before, I decided to follow the directions to make the smaller loaves. After the dough ha