I have been reading Robert D. Richardson’s 1995 biography Emerson: The Mind On Fire. I find myself more fascinated by Emerson’s use of notebooks than by his actual writing or transcendentalism. Halfway through the biography, it seems to me that Emerson thought through his notebooks. By the end of his life, he’d filled hundreds of…
It recently occurred to me that I have been using and collecting Field Notes notebooks for more than a decade now. My first notebook dates from June 2015, which means I’ve been using these notebooks longer than our youngest daughter has been alive. In that time, I’ve collected a few hundred notebooks, thanks in part to the…
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…
I filled up my 30th Field Notes notebook since 2015 this evening. From the stacks of empty notebook, I chose one of their recent United States of Letterpress editions as my next one. I love starting a new notebook. When I get to the last few pages of the old notebook, I find myself looking…
Writers of old had it easy. Take sportswriters, for instance. When it came to actually sitting down and writing, their biggest decision was which brand of typewriter to use. Some of those manual typewriters could be tiring, but the stories were rarely that long. They filed their stories by wire, and then went out for…
I have a ton of documents to work on today in preparation for a design review this afternoon. Most of the documents are Visio documents (for those not familiar with Visio, it’s a Microsoft tool for creating specific types of drawings, database diagrams, flowcharts, UML, etc.). Several documents are in Word and a few are…
Microsoft Outlook has had, for several versions now, a feature whereby it will remove “extra” line breaks when displaying messages. I have no idea why it does this. It seems to serve no purpose. Here we are at a point in the history of our planet when forests are disappearing, when ice caps are shrinking,…
Almost no one who reads this is a programmer of any kind, so this will mean very little to you. But I just have to say that I spent the last 2-1/2 hours trying to debug a type problem in a C# .NET application I am working on. I added a cool feature that allowed…
There were some problems with the development server that I was using this morning. What made it worse is that the server is in Santa Monica and I can’t just walk up to it on smack it. I couldn’t even make a remote connection to it. Aside from other things, this server is our source…
Well, what I thought was going to take me a full eight hours took under four. It must be the music! I can now move onto some other stuff–in particular a bug that was reported late last week in some software that is rolling out on March 5.
Ladies and gentlemen, some advice: When you are developing a software system in environment A with the full intention of rolling it out in environment A, do not be so foolhardy as to allow the Powers That Be to decide it will be rolled out in environment B. What should have taken an hour or…
I recently gave a briefing on some software I have been developing to a fairly large audience of technical people. These were all people within my department, and the purpose of these briefings is to keep everyone up to speed on interesting projects going on in the department. I usually do these off-the-cuff, but I…