My first TinyLetter missive crossposted to this blog

Hello and happy Saturday! I noticed someone just joined and remembered that I never wrote an inaugural tiny letter, ever.

I thought I would just throw down some of the latest news of what's going on here. For the day-to-day, since I work from home, I walk everywhere so I work all around my own—and adjacent—neighborhoods, from café-to-café, from one public library to another.

I schlepp my Freitag bag and make days of it. Now that it's Autumn, I'll probably go further-afield (lower heat equals wider range) and wander to further off cafés and more distant libraries. In other news:

Mustache: I grew up in Hawaii from '76-'88 and so I am nostalgia-binging Magnum PI so I decided to give a mustache a go. Now, it's formidable. I call it my Bolton because it's white and, now, bushy. When I shower and brush my teeth, seeing that shaggy thing squatting on my upper lip, beneath my nose, it literally makes me laugh out loud and gives me a lot of joy. 

FameRep: my partners and I launched a boutique agency dedicated to online reputation and perception management. Called FameRep, it's really just a formalized brand that represents the collaboration that Juan Vides, of TECHACS, and Dan Krueger and I, of Gerr.is, have been doing for half-a-decade and Dan and I have been doing since we worked together as President and COO of Abraham Harrison since 2008. 

Gerr.is: Dan and I are still doing cool influencer marketing, micro-influencer marketing, and social media marketing work as partners and co-founders of Gerris Corp.

UpWork: You can hire me today via UpWork! I am having a lot of fun cheating on both FameRep and Gerr.is with UpWork. Formerly called oDesk, it's a "gig economy" website where experts in stuff can offer their wares hourly or per-project. I had only used it to offshore teams but when things got a little lean over the Summer, I discovered that there are loads of US Only gigs that pay as well as anything I have been able to find anywhere, especially as someone with as much experience as I have. I have done SEO gigs, I have sorted out people's reputation on Google search, I have helped people port one site and one domain smoothly to another, I have helped people sort out their Wordpress, Wix, and Squarespace sites. I love practical work so it makes me happy to not have to do much selling or business development and actually get to do the work.

Kaffeehaus: I am sitting in a comfy chair in a Starbucks in South Arlington, Virginia, getting a little work done while having slow German podcasts piped through my Bluetooth headset (I am trying not to lose my ear). This is the first time I have tried to do this. It's fun to take my news this way. I wonder how it'll affect my current events.

Kindle DX: I am also awaiting the delivery of an old, used, no longer made, Kindle DX (. I own the smaller ones from the same era (a Whispersync and a Wifi unit) but have been reading the Post and the FT via the devices and they don't render any embedded images well at all via the E-Ink so I thought I would try the extremely unpopular, much larger one, I bought off of eBay. It arrives today so we'll see how that works. It is refurbished and has a new battery and International 3G Whispersync so I am hoping that I can just leave it in my EDC bag and have an updated Financial Times and Washington Post with me whenever I have the time.

Tagesereignisse: I studied Political Science at GWU for my first two years and got into the habit of reading an armful of physical newspapers and magazines every week for university. I really used to love to read the paper (actual paper, especially the peach-colored FT, and the oddly-shaped Wall Street Journal) but my apartment building is surely the Bermuda triangle for both mail and newspapers so the closes thing, to me, is the E-Ink Kindle (it provides a linear experience where stories are in some sort of decided-upon order that I must page through, from beginning to end, from front to back).

Herz: Healthwise, I am still having heart rhythm issues but everything is managed and I will be visiting a cardiac electrophysiologist in the next couple weeks. So, I am extremely hopeful and confident that medical science and good doctors will make me good as new, one way or another. 

Anyway, that's all I have right now. I am living a very simple life. I gave up both my motorcycle and my car so that I am currently completely pedestrian, for those if you who didn't already know this. But I like it, though I have my eyes on another Honda XR650L or Kawasaki KLR650 (I am so stuck in 80s nostalgia, I can't even stand it, and big thumpers⁠—large capacity single-cylinder dual sports motorcycles—always make me think of the cool dirtbikes that were in the movies in the 70s and 80s.

Anyway, I really hope I find you well. This is a lot longer than I expected. Please let me know if you like it. If you want, I will make it less about my business and more about what's in my head. Or, I can make it more about what I am doing (though I do work too much) or what I am reading or watching. Or, opinions of the world. I guess maybe you can just hit reply; or, maybe, just email me at [email protected].

Otherwise, you're welcome to sign up for my TinyLetter newsletter yourself. 

I promise I will use it from now on. I quite liked it, though having people just sign up to Subscribe to Chris Abraham Blog by Email, after all. But, either way⁠—though forgive me if you end up getting both. I guess, just subscribe to one or the other. I guess it depends on what sort of content you want.

Bonus: Here's a photo I stole off of Google images that shows you the color and size of the Kindle DX I am on pins and needles waiting for my mailman to deliver to me: