It was a hot September. I’m ready for fall to get here.

Trips

Wil turned seven, and we took the family to LEGOLAND Florida to celebrate. He had a blast and loved every minute of it. As an adult, though, I was disappointed by the park’s lack of polish and attention to detail. We stayed at the on-property hotel, and the room was nice but way too dark; we all ended up using our flashlights to find things during the stay. One of the “perks” of staying at the hotel is entering the park 30 minutes before the general public. The catch: only the shops near the entrance are open during that window. That’s misleading, not much of a perk for staying on property.

The whole family agreed that the Galacticoaster was the best ride there. Think a smaller, less intense version of Guardians of the Galaxy at EPCOT. I wonder if the same designer built it. Pretty much every other ride was on par with something you’d find at Magic Kingdom.

Would I recommend going? Only if you have small children who don’t care about the rough edges of the park.

Books

  • Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane – I didn’t enjoy this one much. It would have helped to know it was part of a series. Whoops, should have done my homework. I felt dropped into the middle of a story, which I was. The two main characters were too powerful and too lucky, and there weren’t enough stakes to make it suspenseful.

  • Carl’s Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl #2) by Matt Dinniman – Okay, okay, I gave in and read the second book because I had to know what happens. These are pure bubblegum reads. Like Gone, Baby, Gone, the protagonists are too powerful, but here it works. It reads like a power fantasy on the level of comic book superheroes.

  • The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (Dungeon Crawler Carl #3) by Matt Dinniman – Yep, I kept reading. At this point I’ll probably read the whole series, but don’t hold me to that. This one was harder to read, even with the author’s note not to worry about the layout of “The Tangle.” My mind wouldn’t let it go; I kept trying to make sense of where everything was. I respect the design, though.

TV

  • The Agency – It took a couple of episodes to get invested, but now that I’m near the end of season one, I can’t put it down. My only problem is I only watch TV during lunch, so that’s about 30 minutes a day at best.

Projects

  • A fork of NetNewsWire for the Mac with an option for vim-style key navigation
  • My take on HiDock, smoothing over some of the rough edges I’ve run into with that app
  • Latch, a macOS menubar app that locks my screen when my watch is too far from my computer