I. The Wrong Hobby For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer of some kind. I didn’t start writing with the idea of submitting and selling pieces until my junior year in college. But even before then, I wrote. In third grade, I wrote a story about two friends who…
Every now and then, I come across a website that reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Take, for example, the computer science professors Brian Kernighan and Donald Knuth. Kernighan’s site is a little more elaborate than Knuth’s. For those who remember the early days of the Internet, Knuth’s site looks pretty close, but both remind…
“Books are a uniquely portable magic,” Stephen King wrote. When I was just a youngster, my mom would tell me that books can take you anywhere. Isaac Asimov talked about books being a form of telepathy, a kind of direct communication between the mind of the writer and the mind of the reader. Books can…
I successfully concluded a week of consecutive posting yesterday. In the space of a week I’ve managed to debut a new series on books, marvel at the art of sports writing, lament the limitations of e-books (or the joy of paper books, if you are a “half the book left” kind of person), provide yet another example of my flawed…
This is the story of Usenet, an obsession with astronauts, a deep dive into NASA history, a delightful discovery, forgetting that discovery for a quarter century, and my inability to successfully carry out a Google search. This story begins in the 1990s, deep in the bowels of Usenet, which was social media in the days…
Later this year—October 25 to be precise—will be the 20th anniversary of this blog, if you can believe that. In its original incarnation, this blog started in LiveJournal and then migrated to WordPress a few years later. But the first post I sat down to write was written in LiveJournal, and having created my account, I wrote…
Recently, my dad asked me how it is I remember the details of the past so well. He was specifically referring to my memories of the Granada Hills branch of the L.A. Public Library that I recently described in my inaugural Shelf-Life post. I can’t really explain this, except to say, that is how my…
The first e-book I ever read was Polaris by Jack McDevitt. It was June 2009, and I had just gotten my first Kindle. I was so excited. This was Isaac Asimov’s dream. In his essay, “The Ancient and the Ultimate,” he wrote about the evolution of books into their ultimate form. In his Foundation series of the 1940s,…
In the niches of writing, nestled somewhere under the heading of essay writer, is the sportswriter. It is, to me, an underrated artform as worthy of the name as any other form of writing. Reading a good piece can bring about all kinds of emotions, which is one sign of fine writing. I have on…
Yesterday, without much fanfare, I posted the first of a new series I’m writing called “Shelf-Life.” Each episode in the series is centered around a book on my bookshelf. The inaugural episode centers around Race Against Time by Piers Anthony. I was happy with how it turned out. If this is your cup of tea, check it out.…