Curated Index to the Blog

As of December 2021, I have been writing on this blog for 16+ years. In that time, I have accumulated more than 7,000 posts totaling more than 2.8 million words. With all of those posts, it can be hard to get a sense of what I write here, particularly since I write about whatever comes to mind. I have therefore put together this curated index to provide a jumping off point for some of the posts I’ve written over the years. It is curated because I have select the posts. My goal is to eventually have between 600-700 posts indexed here. That will represent about 10 percent of the total, but that should be enough of a sample for folks who are curious.

As always, thanks for reading!

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

A

Astronomy

• 36 Years from Jupiter to Pluto (2015)
• Backyard Astronomy, 1979 (2021)

B

Baseball

• My Yankees Inside Experience (2012) – A day behind the scenes at Yankee stadium

Blogging

• Isaac Asimov: Proto-Blogger? (2011)
• Why blog (and how do you do it)? (2011)
• Blog Milestone: One Million in One Year! (2014)
• My Blogging Influences (2014)
• Questions and Answers About My Blogging (2014)
• A Blogging Mid-Life Crisis (2016)
• Guest Post Requests Get Meta (2020)

Books

• The Nine Planets by Franklyn M. Branley (2010)
• My Isaac Asimov books: a bibliography in pictures (2011)
• The perfect time machine (2016)
• Presidential Biographies (2016)

C

Christmas

• Jamie’s 10-Step Guide for Writing a Christmas Movie for the Hallmark Channel (2016)
• All I Want For Christmas Is To Be a Syndicated Columnist (2019)

Winston Churchill

• The Death of Marigold Churchill (2014)

Coding

• Tracking Things I Make with GitHub (2015)
• Simple Version Numbers (2016)

Conventions

• My first con: It doesn’t get any better than this! (2007) – Where I hang out with Robert J. Sawyer
• Nebula Weekend 2011, Day 1, Part 1 (2011) – Where I present a Nebula and accept a Nebula Award
• 5 Things that Make Capclave an Outstanding Science Fiction Convention (2013)
• The Amazing Friends I Made at Launch Pad (2013)
• An Open Letter to My 20-Year-Old Self Regarding the 2014 World Fantasy Convention (2014)
• LoneStarCon, Thursday: Day 1 (2013)

D

Dreams

• Dreaming You Missed Your Final Exam (2016)

E

Education

• (Almost) Everything I learned about science I learned from Isaac Asimov (2010)

Entertainers

• Time Traveling with Bing Crosby (2013)

G

Guest posts

• Guest Post Over at SF Signal: “Daddy, What’s Dungeons & Dragons?” (2014)

H

Holidays

• Our Thanksgiving Dinner (2012)
• Black Friday (2016)
• “Giving Tuesday” Morning Quarterback (2019)

J

Journals/journaling

• The Paradox of Journaling (2017)
• Bullet Journal: One Book to Rule Them All (2018)
• The Diary and the Lens (2019)
• My Journal in the Days of COVID (2020)

L

Letters

• Letters vs. Email (2018)

M

Maine

• We Are Buying a Salt-Water Farm in Maine (2020)

Maps

• Map Reading Is a Dying Art (2016)

Miscellaneous

• Spoiler Alert! (2017)
• Quiet Places (2019)
• The Junk Drawer (2020)

Music

• Non-traditional Lullabies (2016)

N

Newspapers

• My Favorite Newspaper (2017)
• Do Fifth-Graders Still Learn to Read the Newspaper? (2019)

Notebooks

• 2 Annotated Pages in My Fields Notes Notebook (2016)
• 500 Years of Da Vinci’s Notebooks (2019)
• Final Pages (2020)

P

Paperless

• Going Paperless: 4 Ways To Use Evernote for National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo) (2012)
• Going Paperless: An Epilogue (2017)

Personal

• My Bad Habits (2016)
• What I Want to Be When I Grow Up (2016)

Productivity

• What I Learned on My Internet Vacation (2012)
• 3 productivity tips from Winston Churchill (2014)
• Thomas Jefferson: Lifehacker (2015)

Q

Quantified self

• Life-Logging: The Problem with Food and Mood Tracking (2013)
• Remembering Everything: An Evernote Coda to My Life In Weeks (2014)

R

Reading

• One of My All-Time Favorite Quotes (2014)
• Audio Books: Listening versus Reading (2014)
• The Mathematics of Reading (2017)
• Why I Read: An Essay in Two Acts (2018)
• 1,000 Books Finished and It Only Took 25 Years! (2020)
• The Practical Value of Reading Biographies (2021)

S

School

• The Los Angeles Unified School District Strike of 1989 (2011)
• The Fun They Had (2020)

Science fiction

• I, Robot; I, Robot; I, Robot; and I, Robot (2011)
• Vacation in the golden age of science fiction (2011)
• Vacation in the Golden Age, Episode 1: July 1939 (2011)
• What I found in the 1942 issues of Astounding Science Fiction (2011)
• FAQ: How can you be a science fiction writer/fan if you don’t like sci-fi movies/TV? (2012)
• My Favorite Fictional Battle Scenes (2014)

T

Technology

• Dr. Seuss Predicts the Nook in 1960 (2011)
• My Visit to Evernote Headquarters (2012)
• Retiring My Voicemail (2013)

Television

• A World Without Television (2010)
• My first ever Doctor Who episode: “Blink!” (2011)
• The Golden Age of Television (2019)

Travel

• A journey to Miletus (2007)
• Adventures of the Little Man and Little Miss at Disney World, Day 2: Animal Kingdom and Epcot (2012)
• Flying vs. Driving (2016)
• At the Scene of the Crime (2017) — Ford Theater
• A Trip to Gunston Hall (2017)
• Driving Interstate 95 (2018)
• People Used To be Travelers (2018)
• Trains (2019)
• My Favorite Airport (2020)
• Vacation in Colonial America (2020)

W

Writers

• The “lost” Harlan Ellison meeting (2007)
• Isaac Asimov and Stephen King: A Few Words Between Fellow Writers (2012)
• Ray Bradbury: The Rocket Man (1920-2012) (2012)
• Four Fantastic Columnists (2017)

Writing

• Five tips for a successful NaNoWriMo (and how Scrivener can help) (2011)
• Another Possibly Useful #NaNoWriMo Tip To Avoid Rewriting (2012)
• Describing My Stories (2012)
• I Once Received a Personal Rejection From Algis Budrys (2013)
• 5 Tips for NaNoWriMo I’ve Learned from My 464-Day Writing Streak) (2014)
• 9 Phases I Went Through to Become a Writer (2014)
• A Heatmap of Over 900 Days of Writing Data from My Google Docs Writing Tracker (2015)
• How Do You Find Time to Write? (2015)
• The Evolution of First Lines (2018)
• One Title Is Better Than Two (2020)

Writing tools

• Building and Managing Story Timelines in Scrivener (2011)
• A Good Word Processor Should Do 3 Things Really Well (2013)