THIS IS HOW WE DO IT

There’s a certain way to do TikTok, sure.

You can half-ass Instagram, and get 12 likes. I get it.

Or you can just do what YOU wanna do, and not worry about being a 12 person marketing and social media team.

Not everything is social media.

BENCH MAKES TAX TIME A BREEZE

Look, we’ve all got out strenghts and weaknesses.

Since I’ve been self-employed since 2006 (18 freaking years), I’ve never really been great with the whole taxes thing. All the expense tracking. The forms. Writing off all those tiny bank fees – those all add up!

I used to do everything in Freshbooks, and it was a MESS. Always. So much manual input. Or some months I’d just not clean up my books. I was a wreck.

Three years ago or so I bit the bullet and signed up for Bench. They connect to your bank accounts and do your bookkeeping. They used to shuffle your books over to another company for taxes, but now they process and file your taxes, too.

They also have this messaging feature through their website, too. So you can ask all sorts of questions about books, expenses, and taxes, and it’s CHILL because it’s just CHAT. With REAL PEOPLE.

If needed, you can book a call with them to talk about your books and taxes. It’s all included, and I LOVE IT.

Now… halfway through last year, I “streamlined” my operations and cut a bunch of expenses, so I thought, eh, I can manage my books myself!

Then it was the xmas holiday, and I still needed to process my books from November, and then December was lurking, too! I dreaded even getting started.

So I came crawling back (had great phone conversations with their team), and got re-started.

Here’s the thing – they have a “CATCH UP SERVICE.”

So they got connected back to my bank account, I uploaded some bank statements, and then they got my books settled from June-December.

It wasn’t free, of course, but it was WORTH IT.

Everything was updated, all books current. It was great.

Now, I just reviewed my taxes today, April 2nd, and we’re like, good to go. All done. In years past I’d get to filing my taxes in like, AUGUST or something, cuz I just kept pushing it off. Hell, I didn’t even file my 2019 taxes because of the whole COVID thing. Yeah… tax stuff is my weakness!

If that sounds similar to how you treat tax time, I highly recommend them. Check out Bench (affiliate link) and see if they might be a fit for you.

IMPACT

Had a wonderful conversation with a dear friend today, about life and work. And the big thing that came up was about impact.

That while money and the bank account are usually the biggest factors in our work, sometimes it’s impact that counts for most. And to somehow be in a position to seek opportunities for impact, that’s the dream. The bills are paid, there’s food in the fridge, and that opens up space for impact, and I gotta say, it sure feels nice.

GETTING IPHONE PHOTOS ONTO MY COMPUTER

Since I no longer keep my photos in Apple Photos, I needed a way to transfer my photos from my iPhone to my new file system.

I knew I could plug in my iPhone via USB cable and then use Image Capture to get the photos, but transferring the photos wirelessly would be really nice.

I was looking at USB thumb drives that I could plug into the Lightning port (on the iPhone 14 Plus), export the photos, and then plug into my Mac via the USB C plug.

This seemed fine, except I’d be using SansDisk software. I watched a few YouTube videos, and it looked atrocious.

Not to mention, sure, that’s another $50 purchase.

I then remembered that Dropbox has cloud photo storage. I’ve got the space in my account, and it seems that a month’s worth of photos on my phone is around 5GB of space.

So now, at the end of every month, I can export the images from Dropbox on my Mac and drag them into my new file system.

There is no clunky SansDisk software, no extra purchase, and it all works seamlessly in the background. I did it today for the images, too, and it’s absolutely fine.

GOODBYE, APPLE PHOTOS

The photo you see on the right is from 2002, which is 22 years ago. Apple’s iPhoto launched the same year, but I didn’t get my first Mac until 2003, which is when I must’ve started pouring photos into my computer.

Here we are 20+ years later, and my Photos library is over 350GB in space, but too large to sit on my my new 512GB MacBook Pro.

So the file sits on a 2TB external HD. Everytime I click on a photo, or an album, or anything, I get a beachball.

And since I’m getting more into taking photos with an actual digital camera, that means I need to put more photos into iPhoto (or whatever the fuck it’s called now), which just means more of the same – beachballs, slow, partially downloaded images.

So I finally exported all my photos by year into their own folder.

Yep, everything is out of sort, nothing is tagged, I lose the whole AI functionality of finding the word “burger” in a sign from a decade ago, but that’s ok with me. I also can’t bring up any photo on my phone at any time, but oh well.

I have over 3,000 screen shots.

What the fuck do I need all those for?

And did you know if you have LIVE PHOTOS turned on, like every image has a corresponding video file of a 2-5 seconds?

So 1000 photos is really 2000 files. Of shit I’ll never need again in my life.

Somehow I have duplicate files – sometimes 3x, 4x, 5x copies. Zero idea why.

Not sure the designers of Apple Photos planned on people like me with 22 years of photos, but here we are.

CDS ARE REAL

CJ Chilvers knows his music, so when he streamed Extreme’s Cupid’s Dead he got a surprise:

“I noticed something new in the song “Cupid’s Dead.” Trumpets! I had 30 years of experience with that song. There had never been horns in it. But here they were, being annoying as hell and obscuring Nuno’s incredible riffs.”

I had the same experience with Soundgarden’s ‘Outshined.’

When you’ve listened to a song for THIRTY YEARS you notice the difference, and it’s jarring.

CJ’s “Why I went back to buying CDs (and you should too)” is well worth the time, and makes me want to get back to building my CD collection.

SOME WONDERFUL CATS

My cat Blue, wagging is tail and giving me that look because he hasn’t been fed in 12 minutes. What a scamp.

This little guy came to say hello while I was out for a walk, and thankfully had my camera ready for such a treat.

FIND THE FOG

I planned on visiting one park, but the highway was closed off, so I just kept driving. Eventually, I saw a hill and some fog, so I drove towards the fog and found this park.

It was wet, cold, and gross, perfect for keeping other people away.

I’m also a sucker for views without much of a view. Overcast sheets of nothing are good for my soul.