Eric Binnion

  • Hero and I made Pina Coladas last night for New Year’s Eve

  • This little ball is Ember’s favorite toy. It’s funny to see her try to eat it since it doesn’t fit in her mouth. 😄

  • Hero started his first job this past Friday. We went up to his work for lunch today.

  • Sara, Ember, and I went to the MSU women’s basketball game tonight. We timed her feed well, so Ember slept much of the game.

  • We’ve been trying to do more tummy time with Ember. She’s been turning it into back time.

  • I was looking through Pokemon cards earlier and came across this Espeon. It’s probably the coolest holo card that I’ve seen.

  • I always like seeing my wrapped from Spotify. It was no surprise that Ludovico is at the top of the list.

  • Met some friends in DFW last night for dinner.

  • Drove to DFW to have dinner with some friends and took advantage of the lights.

  • Watching some Laracasts and Ember decided to fall asleep. We’ll have to work on this. 😄

  • We recently took Ember to her first MSU basketball game!

  • Weekend relaxing on the porch with Ember.

  • Ember had her first Christmas photo shoot yesterday!

  • Welcoming Ember Home

    We’ve recently welcomed Ember Mae to our family! 🥳

    After two surgeries, 7 weeks in the NICU, and then some acclimating at home, I wanted to take some time to share a few photos.

    It was many months from learning about Ember’s Spina Bifida to her leaving the NICU. That said, I’m only sharing a few snapshots of our life over that time.

    Let’s start at the beginning: the first major milestone was Ember’s surgery to close the opening in her spine while she was still in Sara (my wife). This procedure, performed before birth, was nothing short of mind-blowing. The first photo shows Sara pre-op, and the second captures her post-op, recovering with some Pokémon: Indigo League to keep her spirits up.

    Let’s be honest, it was more so to keep my spirits up.

    As part of Sara’s post-op care, we were instructed to relocate to Houston—about six hours from home—two months before Ember’s due date. We made the move, and on our first weekend there, July 6th, we took our son to Galveston to enjoy the ocean.

    That weekend, though, a different kind of storm loomed. Hurricane Beryl was on its way and made landfall on July 8th. The storm left us without power or Internet and introduced a series of challenges:

    • Difficulty in finding gas while needing to drive 20–30 minutes each way to the hospital.
    • Spoiled groceries after days without electricity.
    • Handwritten hospital notes due to downed phone lines.
    • Sweltering nights without A/C.

    And then, on July 8th, amidst the chaos, Sara’s water broke. Whether it was stress, the storm’s pressure changes, or just Ember deciding it was time, we’ll never know.

    Ember was born on July 10th, weighing just 4 lbs. She went directly to the NICU, where she stayed for seven weeks. During that time, she underwent another surgery to place a shunt to relieve pressure on her brain.

    One of the earliest photos we have is of her patch shortly after birth. While it looked tough, the doctors assured us it was healing well. After a few weeks, we were finally able to hold Ember under specific conditions—a moment we’ll never forget.

    The patch shortly after birth.
    This was the patch several days after birth. While it looks nasty, the doctors suggested it was actually good.
    After several weeks, we were finally able to hold Ember under certain conditions.

    Seven weeks later, we brought our little fighter home. Ember’s journey with Spina Bifida isn’t over, but we’re incredibly grateful for how well she’s doing now. She retains the use of her legs and, for now, doesn’t require catheterization.

    Though the future holds uncertainties, we’re cherishing every moment with our healthy, strong little girl.

  • Book haul from used book fair

    This past week, Sara and I went to the Wichita Adult Literacy Council’s annual book fair. We ended up getting about 60 books for about $75!

    Here’s a photo of much of my book haul.

    You’ll notice that there’s quite a bit of Terry Pratchett. I picked up every Terry Pratchett book from the book fair that I could find after Konstantin Obenland recently told me that he was reading a book by the same author.

    I’m currently finishing up the Ender and Shadow series by Orson Scott Card. But, I’m looking forward to picking up these books later this year!

  • A sheepadoodle relaxing at home

    I was introducing ChatGPT to a friend the other day and decided that it’d be fun to create some images of sheepadoodles.

    Here’s one of a sheepadoodle relaxing and reading a book.

  • Valentine’s Day Ride and Lunch

    I needed to get out of the house for a bit yesterday. So, I took Sara for a quick bike ride to Qdoba for lunch. It also turned out that they were doing buy one meal get one free for Valentine’s day.

  • Generated sheepadoodles photo

    After generating a logo for my son earlier, I decided to take a pass at generating a photo of my sheepadoodle puppies and was able to get the following with ChatGPT.

  • My Obsidian Workflow as of 2024-02

    I’ve been using Obsidian since 2022-01-31, so a little more than two years now. In that time, I’ve largely lurked in the community, absorbing the workflows and tips that others share.

    After a coworker started using Obsidian, I decided it was time to document my current processes in case they might be useful.

    Basic structure

    When I initially started, I only used daily notes, so I didn’t really need any structure. But, after a while, as I learned more and as I started using Obsidian for more than just daily notes, I attempted to adopt the PARA method. While this is a system that was recommended by Tiago Forte, the author of Building a Second Brain, this structure never really clicked for me.

    Fast forward to a few weeks ago where I see this tweet from James Bedford about his organizational structure. Immediately upon seeing this, this structure seemed to make more sense. I’ve now largely adopted this, but with some minor tweaking. Here’s what my current structure looks like:

    • 01 North Star
    • 02 Journals
    • 03 Commonplace
    • 04 Outputs
    • 05 Workspace
    • 06 People
    • 07 Utilities
    • 00 Home

    The primary tweak here is that I’ve added the People directory, which is where I put notes about family, friends, and coworkers.

    Daily notes as the driver

    Probably 90% of my day-to-day use of Obsidian is in daily notes. I find this to be the simplest and quickest way to boot up into a note.

    I also have no issues with stuffing things in daily notes, just in case I might need it in the future. I can use cmd + f to find it later. 😄

    My daily note template is relatively simple with just two sections: tasks and notes.

    I don’t use the tasks plugin. I just create tasks with markdown for a given day. If I’m not able to complete a task on a given day, I manually copy it to the next day. If I find that I have to keep copying a task, at some point, I just stop copying it because apparently it’s not that important.

    I learned this tip from my friend, Paolo Belcastro, who once described the same system to me, albeit on paper.

    The notes section is for everything else, including notes from 1:1s, meetings, quick ideas, a log of things I did, etc.

    While I have the Note Refactor plugin, I very rarely use it. I reserve refactoring for if there’s very large amount of text or when I need to reference a point across multiple notes.

    Obsidian Sync Over iCloud

    I used iCloud for syncing my notes between desktop and mobile for nearly two years. It was only recently where I hit an issue where the mobile app wouldn’t load and complained about some issues with iCloud.

    I’ve switched to Obsidian Sync and have anecdotally noticed that things seem to be running better.

    Readwise

    Before Readwise, I always felt that I was missing a critical piece of learning and reflection. I’d invest a lot of time into reading books and other material, but I didn’t have a good process to pull insights back out.

    Readwise has largely filled that gap for me with its ability to import Kindle highlights, saved tweets, and with their reader. Now, when I highlight anything, I know that it gets stored in Readwise, synced to Obsidian, and Readwise will resurface highlights to me over time.

    Logging Ideas

    This is perhaps the coolest and most useful integration that I have, at least for my sleep. 😄

    When I’m in bed and trying to sleep, I often have wandering thoughts that keep me up. I’ve found that if I just get the thought written down somewhere, then I can get it off of my mind and then I can go to sleep. But, this means that I need to open my phone up or turn a light on and find pen and paper.

    This process recently became much easier thanks to a couple of Siri shortcuts I created for use on my iPhone and Apple Watch.

    One shortcut to allow me to dictate an idea and have that idea get stored in iCloud drive as a txt file. Another shortcut to move those files from iCloud drive to my Obsidian vault.

    I found that having both shortcuts was necessary if I wanted to support using the shortcut on my Apple Watch. But, if I only wanted to use the shortcut on my iPhone then I could write the note directly to the Obsidian vault. But, the Apple Watch has a different filesystem and I wasn’t able to figure out how to write to my iPhone.

    Here are the links to the two shortcuts. Although the log idea shortcut should work out of the box, you will likely need to update the vault location for the sync shortcut to function correctly.

    Last thoughts

    My number one piece of advice for anyone getting started is to simply begin. Don’t worry too much about having the best workflow or structure. As issues naturally arise with your workflow, you’ll make tweaks and build what works best for you.

  • Bike in Downtown

    On Thursday, I rode the bike down town and got this picture while on 8th street.