• How To Remap Cmd-I To Avoid Opening the Mail App on a Mac

    30 Jul 2021 » 2 min read about tech

    Something changed recently with respect to keyboard mappings on my Mac. A few days ago, I was writing a post, and hit the Cmd-I key to put my editor in italics mode. Instead, the Mail App opened up and a copy of what I had written had been pasted into a blank email message. That…

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  • Weekly Playbook #5: Handling Email

    30 Jul 2021 » 6 min read about Weekly Playbook

    For an overview of this series, see the debut post on my morning routine. Background I’ve been using email for more than half my life. While it was available to me in college, I didn’t begin to use it until I started at my job a few months after I graduated. That was 1994 and…

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  • My Annual Summer “I’m On Vacation” Photo

    29 Jul 2021 » 1 min read about Blog & Site Meta

    My vacation began just a few minutes ago and I couldn’t begin before taking my annual summer “I’m on vacation!” photo. It is nice to be on vacation after a very busy first half of 2021. We have some fun plans, which I’ll eventually write about here. There is something magical about the first few…

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  • The Weight of a Streak

    29 Jul 2021 » 3 min read

    Back on April 10, WordPress notified me that I had a 100 consecutive day streak of posting underway. I thought it was nice of WordPress to notice this and let me know about it. Thereafter, for the next 108 days (as of this writing), WordPress has sent me a daily reminder of my posting streak.…

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  • Failed Attempts at Digital Journaling

    28 Jul 2021 » 4 min read

    It is important to know what you are not good at, if for no other reason than to decide either to improve, or to stop wasting time on them. Over the years, for instance, I have made several attempts at keeping my journal in digital form, instead of in notebooks of various kinds. My reasons…

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  • One Last First Trip to the Library

    27 Jul 2021 » 3 min read

    One of the great pleasures of having a child five years younger than the next oldest child is that I get to revisit things that I did with the older kids, and maybe savor the moments a bit more than I did the first times around. Yesterday, for instance, I took the Littlest Miss to…

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  • Milestone: 3 Million Views on the Blog

    26 Jul 2021 » 2 min read about Blog & Site Meta

    Over the weekend, the blog passed a major milestone: 3 million views over its nearly 16 years life. It is creeping up on a second milestone, 1.5 million unique visitors over that same period of time. When I started the blog (on LiveJournal! remember that?) I had no plan. I just thought it would be…

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  • Adding Pins to the Map

    26 Jul 2021 » 3 min read

    Later this summer we will be heading on our annual summer road trip, or what I like to call “adding pins to the map.” For our tenth anniversary, Kelly got me a framed map of the United States that came with a tin of pins. The title at the bottom of the map is “The…

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  • Trailhead: My Newest Field Notes Addition

    25 Jul 2021 » 2 min read

    As part of my Field Notes annual subscription, I get a quarterly shipment of the newest Field Notes notebooks. Yesterday’s mail brought their 51st quarterly edition, “Trailhead.” This edition’s theme, as you might guess from the title, are the great trails of the United States. Each 3-pack of notebooks comes with a different trail printed…

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  • Audible Stats for the first Half of 2021

    24 Jul 2021 » 1 min read about Reading & Books

    Audible was kind enough to send me an email highlighting some of my listening stats for the first half of 2021. Here is what they sent me: That 24,063 minutes amounts to about 400 hours of listening time so far this year. Keep in mind that the 76 titles is how many titles I’ve started,…

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