As readers know, I have kept a list of books I have read since 1996. (As of this writing, there are 1,241 books on the list.) Last spring, I tried to estimate how many books I read before I kept my list. I have been thinking about it more and more, and over the last few weeks, have been trying to remember the books I read beginning in kindergarten. As I remembered books, I scribbled them on a few pieces of notebook paper. To make it easier to remember, I divided the list into several sections: grade school, junior high school, high school, college, and 1994-1995.
The result is a list of books I read before 1996, which I have now published online along with my other reading lists. The list is not complete. I’d guess that I was able to recall about half of the books I actually read between 1977 and 1995. Other than being divided into the sections listed above, the books are in order I recalled them when trying to remember what I’d read. A lot of books I read in junior high school and college for classes have faded from my memory. A lot of books I read for fun remained. So while this list is not complete, it is a good representation of my reading in the years before 1996.
As I recall more books, I’ll add them to the list.
Written on 11 March 2023.
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I began keeping a list of all of the books I read beginning in 1996. I was almost 24 years old, and I think the inspiration to keep a list came from a list I’d seen online by someone who’d been keeping the list since 1974. I lamented the fact that I’d missed tracking twenty-plus years of books I’d read. Yet when I finally began keeping the list, it was at a time when I decided to try reading a book a week. My list, I figured, would grow quickly. My list has taken various forms online over the years, but my “master” list is contained in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook where, at the moment, the 1,240 books I’ve read take up almost all of the first 60 pages.
Over the weekend, the Littlest Miss discovered a stack of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books on my bookshelf. She is 6-1/2, a very good reader, and she asked me about those books. I explained the concept of them to her, and she seemed excited by it. So much so, that she sat down Friday evening and read through one of them. Now, “reading through” a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book is not a linear process, but she seemed to attempt every possible permutation. She did it in a logic way, too. She told me that when she went back to the beginning, she’d skipped the parts she already read, and only read the new parts.
She finished the book that very evening. When she finished, she came up to me and asked if we could start her own list of books. I’d set aside a fresh Leuchtturm1917 notebook for this very purpose. We opened the wrapping on it together, and I explained to her my simple rules for keeping my list:
Only books I finish go on the list. I don’t track books I don’t finish. Too much work.
Each finished book gets a number.
If I re-read a book, and finish it again, it goes on the list again with another number, but I also indicate it is a re-read with a ^ after the title.
Paper, e-books, and audiobooks all count, so long as I finish them.
Together, we got her notebook setup. I told her that since it was her notebook and her list, she had to complete the list herself. She wrote the title on the cover (you can see it in the photo above). And then, on the first page of the book, she made her first entry. You can see both of our “first pages” in the image below.
Over the weekend, the Littlest Miss completed 2 more Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books and her list has grown by two additional entries.
I’m envious. If she can keep her list going, not only will she have a more extensive list than I ever had, but her list will reflect the evolution of her thinking and interests from an early age. It will mirror the evolution (and improvement) in her handwriting. And, much as my book list goes, it will act as a kind of memoir of her life. Through some quirk of memory, when I glance through my list, I can remember exactly where I was when I read a particular book on the list, even if I don’t remember the book all that well.
It’s been a delight to see how excited the Littlest Miss was by the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, and also how excited she was to begin keeping her own list. I’ve already told her that she can use my list any time she wants if she is looking for ideas or recommendations. (All books that I’d recommend are indicated by a * in the margin of the page.) It is a journey we are now taking together.
Written on 26 February 2023.
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And then, there’s history. Last summer we did our first trip overseas family trip to Ireland. This summer, we’re returning to Europe, this time to Italy, Switzerland and France. I’ve been to Italy before, but not to Switzerland or France. Knowing we’re going to Italy has been wanting to revisit Italian history before we got. I thought I’d reread Will Durant’s The Renaissance. And then, I realized that since I love Durant’s writing style so much, why not take the opportunity to go back and read the first five books of his Story of Civilization. So that is on-deck as well. And since I’m rereading things, why not also add Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci in the mix.
Between all of this heavy reading, I need to lighten the load. I re-read an old Jack McDevitt novel, The Engines of God and am looking forward to reading his latest Alex Benedict novel, Village in the Sky. As I make my way through Dark Sun, I’ve been surprised by how the first part of the book focuses on Russian espionage into the Manhattan project. It made me crave spy stories, and so 23 years after I first read them, I’m re-reading some of the Jack Ryan novels, in particular the heavy ones: Debt of Honor, Executive Orders, and The Bear and the Dragon.
I generally set a goal of 100 books per year, and I’m well off-pace so far this year, but the books I have been reading lately have been heavy in mass as well as subject. (Executive Orders is over 1,300 pages; Age of Faith by Will Durant is about the same.) The volume of my reading lately is as much as ever.
And this probably explains, at least in part, why I’ve been absent here. I’ll try to do better, but I’ve got a lot of reading to do before our trip this summer.
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Recently, I was notified that I passed my 14th anniversary on WordPress, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to give WordPress a plug here.
I switched to WordPress sometime in late 2008 or early 2009 (I can’t recall exactly at the moment, and I’m in a rush so I’m not going to look it up). This means that my use of WordPress pre-dates the birth of all my kids, the oldest of which will be 14 later this year.
I also believe that WordPress is the longest running software and service that I have consistently used. I’ve been using it for 14+ years. This blog is more than 17 years old. Prior to WordPress, the blog was hosted on LiveJournal (remember that!) and I like WordPress much more. My use of WordPress has outlasted just about every other service I’ve used (save, perhaps Gmail). I was using WordPress when I discovered Evernote, and I was still using WordPress when I finally gave up Evernote last year.
For the first 12 years that I used WordPress, I used a self-installed version of WordPress. But after a dozen years of doing it all myself, I decided to migrate from my self-installed instance to WordPress.com’s hosting service. It was a very good migration and everything about my experience with WordPress has improved since I began using their full-service hosting. (For the record, I use their Business Plan.)
All of this should be a testament to how useful their service has been for me over the years. Moreover, on the very rare instances that I’ve had an issue, their technical support has jumped (sometimes before I even knew there was an issue) to fix the problem quickly. WordPress has been just about the most functionally useful and reliable service that I use on a regular basis, and I heartily recommend the service for anyone looking to host a blog.
(P.S.: In case you are wondering, no one asked me to write this post. I am in no way compensated by WordPress. I wrote it, as I’ve written previous versions, because I use WordPress regularly and I really do think it is an outstanding service.)
Written on 17 January 2023.
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While on winter break I decided to tackle some winter cleaning that I’ve put off for years. I decided to clean up my files and data and organize them into something more useful. This was part of the personal automation effort that I mentioned in my goals for 2023.
I have files that go back to my college days. Looking at my data, I see that the oldest document file I have in my archives goes back to March 10, 1993, when I was junior in college. The data that I have spans just about 30 years. And it was something of a mess.
In order to avoid organizing things, I created “temp” folders to store old stuff. Within those temp folders, I also had “bak” folder with still older stuff. Sometimes, I had multiple copies of these things spread across various parts of my filesystem. Over the break, I decided it was finally time to clean this all up.
A profusion of storage options
To clean things up, I first needed to figure out where to put things. Over the years, I’ve built up a profusion of storage options. Locally, I’ve got a laptop, a Mac Mini and my iPhone. The Mac Mini hosts 2 external disks with 6 TB of storage capacity.
I have an iCloud account with 2 TB of storage. I have Dropbox subscription giving me an additional 2 TB of storage. I have a Office 365 account for the family which gives me somewhere around 5 TB of storage. And I have a Google account with Google Drive and some amount of storage there. And I had files scattered about all of these data sources.
Simplifying my file system
I decided to start by simplifying my file system. I’ve had interesting arc over the years. For a long time, was a strong proponent of cloud storage for the obvious benefits of accessibility. But time and experience has taught me that local access with sufficient backup is most desirable for me, as you never know when a service might go away or be priced out of reach. Also, it’s nice to have everything centralized in one place so that I don’t have to remember which data I store where.
I decided, therefore, that the primary source for my data would be local and that I’d use cloud services as a mechanism for making the data accessible between systems, but not as primary storage.
I decided that there are really three types of data that I work with on a regular basis:
Working documents (source code, spreadsheets, etc.)
Notes (Obsidian, all of my writing, daily notes, diaries, etc.)
Archive (all of my data that in not “active” in the sense that I don’t work with it regularly, but is of great historical value to me)
Working documents
I decided that my working documents would be stored on my local machine, in my Documents folder, and that folder is part of my iCloud Drive, so that whatever is stored there is synchronized with other devices that I use.
Given that one of my goals is to see if I can pare down the tools I use to the smallest possible set1, I found that I was able to consolidate my Documents folder down to just three top-level folder:
The Repos folder contains code repositories for projects I am actively working on–the key word being “actively.”
The Settings folder is where I store various configuration settings, templates, custom fonts I use, and various branding artifacts like profile photos, etc.
Finally, the Wolfram Mathematica folder contains Wolfram Language notebooks I am actively working on. This folder may go away, however. I found that if I enable the “Detect All File Extension” option in Obsidian, I can store my notebooks there, link to the notebooks from other notes, and open the notebooks directly from the links, which is far more useful to me.
For working documents, this is pretty much all I have.
Notes and writing
All of my notes and writing are stored in Obsidian. These days, this is where the vast majority of my daily output goes. I use the Obsidian Sync service to sync my notes between devices. I’ve found the services to be virtually flawless, fast, and extremely reliable. I’ve currently got about 4,000 notes in my Obsidian vault and Obsidian Sync has been perfect in keeping my devices up-to-date. It works so well, that I basically forget it is even running.
I don’t keep my Obsidian vaults on iCloud. There have been issues with vault synchronization when vaults are stored in cloud services like iCloud or Dropbox, and it can occasionally lead to some odd behavior when those services sync files. Instead, I have a separate Vaults folder on my local machine that is not part of a cloud sync service–except for Obsidian Sync–and all of my vaults are stored within that folder.
Archive
As I mentioned, I have files going back 30 years. The most time-consuming part of my winter cleaning was cleaning and organizing that archive, eliminating duplicates, moving things into the archive that belong there and getting rid of things that don’t.
There are really two parts to my archive: Data and Installers. The data portion of my archive is about 15 GB and contains all of the files I’ve worked on over the last 30 years or so. The Installers is much newer than that. Generally, I try to keep copies of older version of software installers whenever I get a new version, so that if I ever run into compatibility issues, I can go back to an older version of a piece of software. This makes up about 8 GB of my archive, so that the total archive currently stands at about 24 GB.
It is important to mention what is not in the archive. Photos and videos I store in Apple Photo which is part of iCloud. I don’t have the time or patience to go through the 30,000 photos and videos I’ve accumulated over the years and pare them down, so I just leave them alone.
I debated where to store my archive. Should I include it iCloud so that it is accessible from all my devices? Or should I keep in one location? After considerable thought, I decided on the latter. My archive is stored on external 3 TB drive connected to my Mac Mini. This drive, along with my Mac Mini, and indeed, all of our household computers, is backed up using CrashPlan, so that if something where to happen to the drive, I wouldn’t lose any data. (There are additional redundancies in place for the archive, but that is a topic for a separate post.) Given that I don’t access the archive regularly, it didn’t seem necessary to keep it in an active cloud service.
Next, I had to figure out how to organize the archive. Over the years, I’ve played around with all kinds of organizational structures, including, most recently, PARA, or even no organization and relying on search functionality to find what I am looking for. But I decided to go old-school and use a more traditional, hierarchical structure to organize the archive instead. The reason is that more and more, I think about how my family would access this data if I wasn’t around. Structures like PARA or arbitrary searches might not work for them. A more obvious hierarchy of topics would be more useful.
Ultimately, I ended up with the following structure:
I tend to sort things from most recently to least recently modified, which explains the order in which the folders appear. The “Photos” folder is not my Apple photos, but rather curated photos that I’ve specifically moved into the archive. Many of these folders contains sub-folders. Here, for instance, is what it looks like inside my Writing folder:
The archive contains all of my personal and work email. I tend to perform these archival functions annually and then zip up the resulting email archives for storage. The earliest email message I have in my archive dates to October 17, 1994.
The archive also contains big social media archives. For instance, when I stopped using Evernote in favor of Obsidian, I did an expert of all of my Evernote data to an archive. Similarly, when I stopped using Facebook, I archived all of my Facebook data. And when things were looking iffy with Twitter, I grabbed an archive of my Twitter data as well. These are all within the Cloud Services section of my archive.
I rely heavily on the file meta-data for finding what I am looking for, particularly filename, modification and creation dates. It is helpful that I’ve kept the original files in many cases because it makes it easier to search the archive in a given timeframe. As I mentioned, some of my files go back as far as 30 years. Here is an example of a few of my files from 30 years ago:
Cleaning up cloud services
In centralizing my files locally, I also took the opportunity to clean up what I had on the various cloud services I use. I had a lot of random stuff on Dropbox that I moved to my archive because I rarely access it these days. Instead, I now use Dropbox as a convenient way to share files, and for some application settings where the application prefers Dropbox over other services for its settings. Also, Dropbox is where my writer’s group stores its stuff, so it is convenient to keep it around. But what I have there is mostly ephemeral now.
We have a family OneDrive from Office 365 and there are a few files I’ve stored there for convenience, but I rarely use Office tools these days outside of work. I moved much of the writing-related documents I had in OneDrive to my archive. What is left there is a few things that are shared between family members.
Still to-do
For several years, between 2013-2016, I used Google Drive almost exclusively for my writing. This is one place that I have yet to tackle cleanup. It is a mess and I imagine it will be a challenge to get it all cleaned up. It should be made easier by the fact that much of what I wrote there should already be in my archive. But it will take time, and I may end up putting off this task until next winter. One indicator of whether I need something is how frequently I access it, and I haven’t needed to access my files in Google Drive in a long time.
Backups
I’ve had a robust strategy for backing up my data, and indeed, all of my family’s data for a long time now. But as it is somewhat off-topic for this post, I’ll save the details of the backup strategy for later.
A feeling of relief
It is amazing what a winter cleaning like this does for the soul. When i completed it, when I had everything setup the way I wanted it, a feeling of relief washed over me. It was a similar feeling to looking over a freshly mown lawn, or a recently cleaned desk surface. Everything was in its place, and everything had a place to go. It’s nice to know that when I create something, there is a clear and obvious place to put it.
It was also a relief to know that I’d finally organized my archive and eliminated all of the duplicate files there.
I am now working on a README file with a target audience of my family that should make it quick and easy for them to find something in the archive in my absence.
Written on 15 January 2023.
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I am on vacation with the family, but I wanted to check-in quickly to let you know that posting should resume here as planned once I am back from vacation. Next week I’ll have a post on some of my early progress on the automation I talked about in my goals post. This one will also include some experimenting with ChatGPT that I’ve done along the way. I’ll also have a post on our vacation, as well as the usual things you’ve come expect here. I’m also working on an essay or two, which I talked about in The Essayist. In the meantime, if you are looking for something to read, check out my best reads from 2022, or some of the best things I read online in 2022.
Meanwhile, I am enjoying vacation with the family. The weather has been fantastic and we are all having a blast. It is a break that we all needed. I can always tell when I am enjoying a vacation when I forget what day of the week it is–when everyday feels like a weekend. I had to check just now to see that it was Wednesday.
Happy Wednesday, everyone! And if I haven’t already said so, Happy New Year!
Written on 4 January 2023.
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With 2022 now behind us, I can safely post my list of 10 best reads of the year, without excluding any potential late-comers. This is actually the second draft of this post. The first draft came in at something over 2,500 words, and as I read it, I thought: No one wants to read this much other stuff. They just want the list. To that end, I’ve tried to cut this significantly.
Summary of my reading in 2022
I read 101 books in 2022, finally meeting my goal of 100 books again, after two consecutive years of falling short. 65 of the 101 books were nonfiction. I was surprised by this because my tendency these last few years has been heavily toward nonfiction. But I reread some old fiction series I’ve enjoyed in the past and that shifted the balance somewhat.
My 10 best reads of 2022
A few notes before I get to the list:
These are the ten books I most enjoyed reading in 2022; they are not the the ten best books that debuted in 2022. The books on the list were published over a wide range of years, the earliest being 1970 with only 2 of the books on the list debuting in 2022.
In past years, I’ve listed the books as a countdown from 10 to 1. It seems to me this buries the lead and is an injustice to the books that I most enjoyed. This year, I’m listing them from my 1 to 10, and damn the suspense.
Here, then, are my best reads of 2022:
1. A Place to Read: Life and Books by Michael Cohen (2014)
This collection of essays by a former professor resonated strongly with me: the subjects, the style, the fact that we were both pilots. The book was an accidental discovery, a rare success for Amazon’s recommendation system. It is one of several books this year that convinced me that I want to be an essayist. It was my favorite read of 2022.
2. Destiny of the Republic: A tale of madness, medicine and the murder of a president by Candice Millard (2011)
I took a big lesson from Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: that anyone rising to a position like that of President of the United States is worth reading about, even if they are not as well known (to me), anyway). James Garfield’s story was gripping, and Millard’s telling of it was wonderful, fascinating, and ultimately heartbreaking.
3. This Living Hand: Essays, 1972-2012 by Edmund Morris (2012)
The essays in This Living Hand run the gamut of subjects, from biographical to autobiographical, big subjects and themes to small ones, like the value of handwriting, and what one can learn from it. I’d had mixed experiences with Edmund Morris in the past, greatly enjoying his 3-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and perplexed by his unorthodox biography of Thomas Edison. But This Living Hand was a treasure to read, and another push toward wanting to write essays.
4. Hell and Back by Craig Johnson (2022)
Hell and Back, the most recent installment in the Walt Longmire series (my favorite fiction series) supplanted the 7th book in the series, Hell is Empty as my favorite Longmire book. This is a different Longmire story, in tone as well as in the way it is told.
5. The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya (2022)
John von Neumann has come up frequently in my reading and from those incidental glances, I had the idea that he was a smart person even among smart people. I was delighted to find and read this new biography of von Neumann, The Man from the Future, and it convinced me that he was very likely the smartest person I have ever read about.
6. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace (2005)
I’ve had Infinite Jest on my bookshelf for years, tempting me. Since I’d been reading a lot of essay collections this year, I thought I’d read some of Wallace’s essays first, and the first collection I read was Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. I was blown away by his writing, and came away awe-struck, and somewhat depressed. I don’t think I could ever write essays as well as Wallace did.
7. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark (2014)
I came to Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe via James Gleick’s Chaos. I was immediately impressed by the scope, style, humor, and imagination that Tegmark put into the book. It was one of those reads that made me want to follow up with more, and I read his book, Life 3.0 as soon as I finished this one.
8. The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 4 by Robert A. Caro (2012)
The 4th volume of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power turned out to be my favorite so far. The arc of Johnson’s career and his thrust into the presidency after the Kennedy assassination is a great illustration of how unique the job is, and how no career, no matter how stories, can really prepare someone for it.
9. The Rising Sun: The Decline & Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-45 by John Toland (1970)
10. The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (2018)
Now and then I imagine what it might be like to own a used bookstore. After reading The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, I no longer have to imagine. This is a charming book about the owner of the largest used bookstore in Scotland, who has kept a diary about the day-to-day running of the shop. I enjoyed it so much that I followed it up with its sequel.
Honorable mentions
In addition to these best reads of the year, here are some other books I read this year worthy of mention:
Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman by Alan Rickman. One of my guilty pleasures is reading memoirs by or about entertainers. This one was unique in that it was the private diaries of Rickman, published posthumously.
DisneyWar by James B. Stewart. A fascinating inside look at the Walt Disney Company during the rise and fall of Michael Eisner.
I am aiming to read at least 100 books in 2023. It is always exciting to start out the year and wonder what will the best reads end up being? I’ll let you know a year from now. In the meantime, if you are interested here, are some past lists:
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Over the years I have spent quite a bit of times on various experiments. In the 2010s, I considered the idea of the paperless office, embraced Evernote as a tool for paperless productivity, and wrote a popular series of posts on the subject. So far, in the early 2020s, my experimenting has shifted somewhat. I’ve re-embraced the idea of plain text files as my fundamental unit of work. A plain text file is both versatile and long-lasting. Text files created in the 1970s can still be read today. I found Obsidian, and took lessons from my Going Paperless experiment, to see what I “practically” paperless[1. As in “practical” uses, as opposed to absolute migration to a paper-free lifestyle.] lifestyle looked like using primarily plain text files.
In 2022, I’ve been pleased with how things are working out with Obsidian and plain text files, but there is room for improvement. I’ve identify three areas to experiment with throughout 2023. My hypothesis for this experiment is that improvements in these three areas will lead to more creative time in the years beyond. The three areas are: (1) Consolidation; (2) Simplification; (3) Automation.
Consolidation
When I look at my computer, I am often overwhelmed by all of the apps and tools I find on it, the vast majority of which I rarely use. It would be nice, I tell myself now and then, to get rid of those tools that I never use, but I am sometimes reluctant to do so, thinking that I might need the tool some day. To some extent, this is no different than trying to declutter at home.
While thinking about this recently, I realized that I made huge strides in consolidation over the last two years in terms of my work products, the vast majority of which are now plain text files. With a work product as simple and versatile as a plain text file, it should be much easier to give up apps I no longer need to manipulate those files.
The more I think about this, the more I believe I can get away with two primary work product formats: plain text files used in conjunction with Obsidian; and Wolfram Language notebooks (.nb files) used in conjunction with Wolfram Language and Mathematica.
Using text files as work products of Obsidian is pretty obvious and I’ve written extensively about my use of Obsidian. But Mathematica1?
I’ve been a very casual, hobbyist user of Mathematica for years now. But the more I play with it, and the more I learn about its symbolic and functional structure, the more impressed I am with the language. Moreover, the language now reaches into all aspects of computing so that it seems useful as a general purpose language. Finally, as a developer, I’ve already mastered more common languages like Python, JavaScript, C#, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc., to my personal satisfaction. Becoming equally proficient in Wolfram Language would something new.
I am mentally dividing this consolidation into two parts:
Plain text files as my primary work product: in the form of notes and writing.
Wolfram Language scripts and notebooks as my primary tool for development and automation.
As I write this, there are about 100 applications in my Application folder on my laptop. That, of course, does not include the command line tools inherent in any Unix-based computer system. I’m using this number of 100 applications as a baseline to see how much I can consolidate over the course of 2023. Obviously, I need more than just Obsidian and Mathematica. For instance, I use Photoshop for photo editing. However, Mathematica has powerful photo- (and video- and sound-) editing tools that may be able to automate and supplant most of what I do in Photoshop. This is an example of the consolidation I am looking to do.
It will be interesting to see how well this consolidation works over the course of 2023.
Simplification
As I worked through my Practically Paperless series, I noted that I was building up more and more complex structures for my notes, as well as relying increasingly on plug-ins, tags, etc.
In the months since finishing that series, I’ve been attempting to simply how I use Obsidian with plain text files. In the process of simplifying, I have the following things in mind to guide me:
My primary work product is a text file. Whether a note, a blog post, a list, a trip summary, a reading note, the primary form in which the content appears is a plain text file.
Using tools like Obsidian is a good for me, but I also keep in mind that these text files need to be useful in the absence of a tool like Obsidian. Keeping the work products themselves simple help in this regard. For example, the structure of markdown makes for simple way of parsing and interpreting these files outside of Obsidian.
I’m trying to simplify my file structure, both within Obsidian and as a whole, including cloud platforms.
Over 2023, I’m looking to continue this simplification of my work products. With the following ideas in mind:
My notes need to be usable outside Obsidian.
My notes and files need to be easy to understand, not just for myself, but for others, especially Kelly and our kids.
My notes and files need to be easy to find for me and for the family.
Automation
I spend a lot of time trying to automate processes. The idea here is to automate the stuff that is repeatable, so that I can spend more time on creative stuff. But often, the time it takes to implement such automation offsets the time it saves. Put another way, if it takes me 2 hours to write a script to automate a task that currently takes me 5 minutes per day, it will take 24 days once the automation is in place to pay back the time it it took to build the automation before it starts paying off.
In the past I’ve used all kinds of tools to implement automations: Python scripts, tools like Alfred or Keyboard Maestro, Apple Shortcuts, etc. In 2023, I am looking to use Wolfram Language as much as possible to automate things, in part because I’m fascinated to see the possibilities in the language, and in part as a way of becoming proficient in the language.
One simple example of this, which I will talk about in more detail in a subsequent post, is adding a list of files I created or updated on a given day to my Daily Notes. it is convenient for me to be able to see at a glance all of the files I worked on in a given day. The way I structure my daily notes makes the daily note the perfect place to store this information. But I don’t want to spend time searching my file system each day for all of the files I created or modified. So I’ve created a Wolfram Language script to do this automatically.
An example of my current Daily Note format, using today’s note.
Throughout 2023, I’ll be looking at how I work2 to identify inefficiencies, things that can be eliminated, and tasks and processes that can be automated, particular:
Things I do frequently and are repeatable. In addition to the above, examples, might include: taking a blog post in note form and automatically publishing it to WordPress; or cropping and editing a photo in a repeatable way
More complex tasks that I perform less frequently but at regular intervals, like archiving information.
Follow along on the journey
Because I know that other people are interesting in this sort of thing (a quick search of “productivity” gives an idea of just how much), I plan to write about this journey of mine throughout the year. As always, I am experimenting to see what works best for me. I know, for instance, that using Wolfram Language for a primary automation and scripting tool is probably outside the norm for many people. But I’m fascinated by the idea and that makes it fun for me. These will tend to be more technical posts, but they might be of interest to others, so, feel free to follow along, ask questions, and offer suggestions.
And Happy New Year, everyone.
Written on 29 December 2022.
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There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but ther are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, tranform a yellow spot into the sun. — Pablo Picasso
November has rolled into December and with it, a milestone on the road of my life is just ahead. December 12, 1992 was the day that I finished the first story I wrote with the idea of submitting it to a magazine. I was still on the junior side of being a Junior in college. I don’t remember exactly what inspired me to do this. It may have been the glossy new science fiction magazine Science Fiction Age that recently debuted on the newsstands. It may have been my wandering through the science fiction stacks in the Tomás Rivera Library when friends and roommates returned home for the weekend and I was left in the apartment all alone. Whatever it was, around December first, I decided that despite all of the school work I had, and the hours I put in at the dorm cafeteria, I was going to write stories and submit them.
That first story was terrible and I promptly sent it off to a magazine I’d never heard of until I saw it listed in a book on writer’s markets. On that December 1, I send out a dozen letters requesting copies of those magazine’s writer’s guidelines, and I sent the story to one of the few that I’d received. It was rejected, of course. In later years, I would sometimes pull the story out in later years and cringe at how badly it was written. But it was a critically important story for three reasons:
It demonstrated that I could tell a story (no matter how awful) with a beginning, middle, and ending.
It proved that I could actually sit down and write the thing, banging it out in Word for DOS 5.51.
Preserved as it is, its sheer awfulness is evidence that I was capable of improving with practice.
I’ve probably written a hundred stories2 in the three decades since that first one. Of those, I sold 11 to magazines and anthologies that pay “professional” rates as defined by the Science Fiction Writers Association. I mention all this because, with that record, it seems to me that thirty years is a good time to officially retire as a fiction writer.
This isn’t the first time I’ve announced my retirement from fiction. Wishful thinking sometimes spurs me to try writing again. The problem is, when I look at the quality of the stories being published today and compare them with mine, mine are mediocre at best. Thirty years of effort simply can’t compete with the amazing quality of fiction I see in the world today. It is one thing to say, “Hey, keep at it, you’ll get better with practice.” It is another to have been practicing for thirty years, and finally admitting that there is a plateau that I have reached in my fiction-writing ability that no amount of practice will overcome. Here is how I visualize my trajectory over time:
Put in mathematical terms, the quality of my fiction writing over time is a limiting function. A lot more practice only improves quality by a tiny amount. I’ve reached the point of greatly diminishing returns. It took me 14 years of practice just to reach the level of quality that allowed me to make professional sales. But based on the fiction I read today, and the quality of the fiction I write, I’m convinced that no amount of practice will get me to the quality of the fiction that is being published today. I can celebrate my minor successes, they were wonderful. And, really, it is the experience that matters.
There is another important lesson I’ve taken from 30 years of writing stories: I’m just not built to be a fiction writer. Paraphrasing what Picasso said of painters, my fiction writing could turn the sun into a yellow spot, but it could not turn a yellow spot into the sun.
Meanwhile, for the last seventeen years, I’ve been flirting with, and finally, practicing writing of another form here on the blog. We call these things “posts” informally, but what I have been trying to produce are essays.
II. The Courtship
My courtship with the essay probably began with Al Martinez and the column he wrote in the Los Angeles Times, a column that I read in the late 80s and early 90s in that transitionary period between high school and college. Martinez’s column was the first that I regularly returned to, and his name is the first newspaper writer that I deliberately remembered and sought out.
I first came to appreciate the essay at its own art form as I read through the hundreds3 of essays that Isaac Asimov wrote in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction over the course of 33 years. These essays were not just entertaining; they had a colloquial, cheerful voice that I think I eventually incorporated into my own writing style. Moreover, I learned something from each one of those essays. I was learning more than I knew.
Later, there was Andy Rooney’s syndicated column, which taught me that essays could be about anything, even mundane things like the pleasure of a wood shop, or the stuff you find in your pocket at the end of the day–and be both funny and entertaining.
I finally fell in love with the essay after reading E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat in 20184. I’ve written about my notion of the perfect story. E. B. White’s essays are perfection of the form.
These courtships produced a Cambrian explosion as I sought out more and more essays. A.J. Liebling on boxing or French cuisine. John McPhee on long-haul truckers or the people of the Pine Barrens. Martin Gardner on math and logic. John Steineck a laAmerica and Americans. Annie Dillard and Jon Krakauer. Will Durant’s shorter pieces on history. Barry Lopez’s nature essays. Paul Theroux’s travel essays. Little pieces by Don Marquis, as tiny as a cockroach, and big pieces by Gore Vidal, the size of his ego. The essays of Michael Cohen on reading, writing, and flying, where we seemed to share the same mind. Edmund Morris on the value of handwriting and David Foster Wallace on the adult entertainment industry5. Today, I seek out essays the way I sought out science fiction thirty years ago.
Meanwhile, I’d started to write essays without knowing it. In 1994, after graduating from college, when e-mail outside of AOL was still new to me, I would sent long essay-like email messages to my recently graduated friends. I wrote letters that were informal essays. And then, for reasons I can no longer recall, in 2005, this blog took its early form on LiveJournal6. My early posts, like my early stories, were pretty bad7. Unlike my fiction, however, writing essays feels natural to me. Fiction requires great amounts of energy and thought. Essays form themselves in my head, almost as if by magic, and writing them is often an exercise in mental dictation. Where I’ve plateaued with fiction, I feel like I am still on an upward trajectory with my essays. I don’t think I can ever be a great fiction writer, but it is not out of the realm of possibility, with more practice, for me to be a great essayist.
I’ve had plenty of practice here on the blog, with more than 7,200 “essays” made up more than 3 million words. The challenge for me is: how can I became better? How can I become great?
III. The Essayist
For starters, I am dedicating myself to writing essays and to writing them here on the blog. I’m still figuring out what this means. In the past, I’ve written here every day, often for years at a time. I produced frequent, shorter (~500 word) pieces of mixed quality. Going forward, you may not see me posting every day the way I used to. Quality takes time and it is the quality I am seeking to improve8.
A careful eye may have noticed this pivot9 already. I’ve changed the tagline of the blog from “Writer” to “Essayist.” I did this on my Twitter profile as well. With a kind of laser focus, I am identifying not just as a writer, but as a writer of essays.
Having embraced the essay as my medium, I need lots of practice to improve to the level that I think I’m capable of attaining. But I’ve got time. I’ll retire from my day job in a little under 9 years. Between now and then, I plan on working on my essay writing here on the blog, with the idea that it is all practice for when I can write full time in retirement.
Unlike my fiction, which was only rarely solicited, my essay writing here on the blog has, in the past, led to requests for writing in other places. Recently, I’ve had a flood of requests to put ads here on the blog, and I’ve rebuffed all of them. I briefly considered doing some writing over on Substack, and then decided against it. I think one of the best measures of quality is when readers reach out to comment on something I’ve written, or they go and tell a friend about it. Another measure is how often people reach asking me to write essays for other outlets. All of this is to say that nothing will change here on the blog. I am committed to keeping the blog subscription-free and ad-free. My hope is that as I improve more and more people will notice and that will lead to opportunities outside the blog, as it has in the past.
I’m still figuring all of this out, which is why I am not committing to any post schedule yet. In my head, I’d like get at least one essay posted each week in 2023, but I want these to be higher quality than what I’ve done in the past and quality takes time. I’m not writing on deadline. I’m writing to see if I can master a form. I’ve started to curate a list of topics to work on. This is not to say that there won’t be the occasional posts like I’ve done in the past. Indeed, I’ve got a few posts lined up on subjects like Obsidian and note-taking10. But my goal is to improve the quality of what I am producing for you, and for me.
Written on 12 November – 4 December, 2022.
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For some reason, I never kept particularly good records about the stories I wrote, so that I know far more about what I’ve read than what I’ve written. ↩
I have now read this book six times and it never palls on me. ↩
Or his essay for Harper’s on visiting the Illinois state fair, which I mentally compared and contrasted with E.B. White’s “The World of Tomorrow” also written for Harper’s about the World’s Fair in New York in 1939. ↩
They were less essay and more Jamie thinking out loud. ↩
Often, I would write a 500 word post 20 minutes before I posted it. I started writing this essay you are reading now back on November 12, and this version is the fourth version I’ve produced. ↩
I’m not particularly fond of this word. It is overused in the startup world, but it does seem accurate here, despite my distaste for it. ↩
As popular as these are, they are not my favorite type of pieces to write. ↩
It is getting close to December which means close to our end-of-year holiday which means time I spend reading for guilty pleasure after a year of serious, hardcore reading. I’ve started to prepare a list of what to read and few days ago, on Twitter, I asked for some recommendations:
As I prepare for my 3 weeks off at the end of the year, I am looking for Hollywood memoirs, a guilty pleasure of mine. Last year I read Mel Brooks. @MelanieANovak, any recommendations?
For me, guilty-pleasure reading1 usually consists of biographies and memoirs about celebrities past, or histories of Hollywood and things like that. It occurred to me that when I asked for recommendations, I didn’t indicate those books that I’ve already read. To remedy that, I create a Guilty Pleasure Reading list on my reading list site listing all of the guilty-pleasure books I’ve read over the years. There, you can see all of the books I’ve read that fall into this category. I’ve included a section on my 5 favorites. And I’ve included links to some posts I’ve written about these books. Now, if you are wondering whether or not I have read a specific Hollywood bio, memoir, or history, you can go to this list and find out.
So far, for the end of the year, I’ve got the following books lined up:
I can usually tackle 6-8 books during this break. If you’ve got other recommendations in this genre, please drop them in the comments. If there are really good, they may supplant the ones listed above.
Written on 21 November 2022.
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In eighth grade my English teacher1 told us that the figure of speech by which a part represents a whole or vice versa was called “synecdoche”, which she pronounced “sink-doh-shay.” From that moment over ensuing decades right down to about 1:15 this afternoon, that is how I pronounced the word in my head on the rare occasions I encountered it.
It is not a word I encounter often in day-to-day life. In my time as a writer working with editors at various magazines, the word never came up. In my time in writers groups critiquing pieces across all genera and species, it has never been uttered. But in this collection of essays I’m reading at the moment2 the word has been used several times. And as I am listening to the audiobook, the narrator keeps mispronouncing the word. Each it is used, the narrator does not say “sink-do-shay,” but instead garbles the word as “se-nek-duh-kee.”
After the fourth or fifth mispronunciation, I could no longer take it. I needed to prove to myself that this word was suffering verbal abuse by the book’s narrator. I looked it up in my trusty Merriam-Webster. I checked the pronunciation. I felt gathering dismay. I checked the pronunciation key3 to make sure I was not misinterpretting what I saw. What I saw was:
\sǝ-‘nek-dǝ-(,)ke\
which is pronounced “se-nek-duh-kee.”
My face reddened with decades of retroactive embarrassment. The narrator was pronouncing the word correctly and it was my English teacher from junior high school who had pronounced the word wrong, setting forth upon the world countless students who would forever mispronounce the word until corrected4, which was not very likely since synecdoche is not a word that comes in often in casual conversation.
The obvious lesson here is one taught in countless spy movies and novels: trust no one. Or its less cynical cliché, trust, but verify.
I’ve seen it said that readers know how to spell words, but don’t always know how to pronounce them correctly, and listeners know how to pronounce words but don’t always know how to spell them correctly. Clearly, I grew up in the former category. I can think of half a dozen examples where I read a word and never heard it pronounced until I listened to an audiobook–and was surprised that I was mispronouncing it in my head. But I won’t bore you with those. I will let synecdoche stand for all the others5.
Written on 16 November 2022.
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Name withheld. The only person I intend to embarrass here is myself. ↩
Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace. A posthumous collection of many of his earlier essays. ↩
Do they even teach kids today how to use a pronunciation key? Or a dictionary, for that matter? ↩
And when first corrected, likely argue that, no, that’s not how you say it. My 8th grade English teacher said it was pronounced thus… ↩
When my embarrassment finally subsided and I thought about writing this up little essay, that final sentence was the first to come to mind, for obvious reasons. ↩
Recently, I have been working on simplifying my notes in Obsidian1. One of the things I have wanted to do for a while is make the list of books I’ve read since 1996 available in simple way that is easy to maintain, but extensible, so that I can eventually include notes about books I’ve read. So I subscribed to the Obsidian Publish service, and after experimenting with various formats, decided to keep things very simple and created a page that lists what I have read since 19962.
The result looks something like this (which may evolve over time, especially if you are reading this post sometime after 15 November 2022):
Some elements of the new reading list:
Clicking on the “Guide to the reading list” will provide some additional information about what appears on the list.
The entire list of everything I’ve read since 1 January 1996 is in a single page. However, you can jump to a given year using the index at the top of the page.
At the beginning of each year is a “Year in review” section in which I list notable reading-related things for that year. As of this writing, I have not yet completed these for every year on the list.
Some book titles contain links to notes about the book in question. These links are mostly just stubs at this point, as I play around with how I want to manage this.
Reading stats
I’ve also added a reading stats page, which has some basic year-by-year stats for the reading that I do. Over time, I see the information on this page growing, almanac-like to cover various aspects of what I’ve read.
Now
Finally, I’ve added what I call a “now” page that lists things I’m working on now, and things I’m currently reading. This is a conventient place to direct people from various online profiles. (You can see it, for instance, in my Twitter profile, for as long as that remains actively useful.)
The reading list site is in its most basic form right now and I see if growing and evolving over time. I’ll post significant updates here on the blog. But you can see more detailed information on the Reading List change log.
Written on 15 November 2022.
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Technical detail for those interested in such things: I’ve hosted my reading list in various places online since the late 1990s. The URL has therefore changed over the years. One of the things I wanted to do with this effort was have a single URL on my site that I could in the future no matter where my list was actually hosted. So I created a stub page in WordPress at the following URL: https://jamierubin.net/reading-list/. On this URL, I setup a redirect that takes you to where my list is hosted on my Obsidian Publish site: https://notes.jtrwriter.com/reading/lists/reading-list. I did this so that what I link to my list in the future, I can link the the short WordPress link, and it will always point to the current location of my reading list, no matter where it is hosted. End technical note. ↩
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