• Retro Posts, Week of 12/12/2021

    18 Dec 2021 » 1 min read about retro-posts

    For those who don’t follow along on Twitter or my Facebook page, I post a link to “retro post” once-a-day, selecting from one of the thousands of posts I’ve written here on the blog over the last 15+ years. Here are the retro posts for this week. My general rule is not to link to anything I’ve written…

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  • Friday Nights in the Dish Room

    18 Dec 2021 » 2 min read

    A few days ago, I sat in my office listening to Sting’s Soul Cages album. Listening to that album, I was immediately transported back to my college days, and in particular, Friday nights in the dish room. For the four years I spent at the University of California, Riverside, I worked in the dorm cafeteria.…

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  • I’m On Vacation! December 2021 Edition

    17 Dec 2021 » 1 min read

    It’s that time of year again. I AM ON VACATION!!! I have the next 22 days off of work! I love the first moment when vacation begins. The whole thing is spread out before me. A 3-week vacation is long enough to lose track of the day of the week. Those are the best vacations.…

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  • Signs of Aging

    17 Dec 2021 » 4 min read

    While vacuuming out the car in preparation for our upcoming trip, I couldn’t help noticing that my lower back ached. I was bending at unusual angles trying to hoover dried Cheerios, Tootsie Pop wrapper, and other unidentifiable detritus from the cracks and crevices of the car’s cabin. I got about half the car done, stood,…

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  • Distraction-Free Writing Tools

    16 Dec 2021 » 5 min read

    There is an interesting article in the current issue of the New Yorker on “Can Distraction-Free Devices Change the Way We Write?” The article, by Julian Lucas, initially made me jealous. How I wish I could have written that piece for the New Yorker. But I soon realized that it was likely that I’d be…

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  • Caffeine Crisis — Averted

    15 Dec 2021 » 3 min read

    When I woke up this past Saturday morning, I had been caffeine-free for 236 days and by about 2 pm or so I had pretty much decided that I was going to need caffeine to make it through the rest of the day. It started with a bad night’s sleep. I mean really bad, as…

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  • Practically Paperless with Obsidian, Episode 10: Associating Notes with Document Types

    14 Dec 2021 » 4 min read

    Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. Last week, in Episode 9, I talked about how I use tags to associate notes with people. This helps me answer the “Who” question that I discussed in Episode 7. If I need to find…

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  • Prepping for the Holidays

    13 Dec 2021 » 5 min read

    Since 2010 we head down to Florida every December to spend the holidays with family, and to have a vacation away from home. Since 2012, we’ve driven so that we avoid the stress of airports, canceled flights, luggage limits. It saves money because we don’t have to buy airline tickets for the five of us,…

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  • Introducing: A Curated Index to the Blog

    12 Dec 2021 » 2 min read about Blog & Site Meta

    Those of you with a keen eye may have noticed a new menu options available on the blog this weekend: A Curated Index to the Blog. This is something I have been wanting to do for a while, and I managed to get about the first 10% percent completed so far. This new page takes…

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  • Retro Posts, Week of 12/5/2021

    11 Dec 2021 » 1 min read about retro-posts

    For those who don’t follow along on Twitter or my Facebook page, I post a link to “retro post” once-a-day, selecting from one of the thousands of posts I’ve written here on the blog over the last 15+ years. Here are the retro posts for this week. My general rule is not to link to anything I’ve written…

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