There are some days that start with meetings early in the morning and end with meetings late into the evening. This entire week has been like that, so I hope you will forgive me if I don’t have something prepared for the blog today. My brain is worn out. Fortunately, I have a new Shelf-Life post coming…
Roughly four years ago, I bought myself a sit-stand desk for my home office. Sitting is sedentary and standing is healthier, I was told. As I wrote at the time, “My idea was that I would stand whenever I was working, and sit when I am not working. Given that the former tends to be more than…
I try to walk twice a day: once first thing in the morning, then again around lunchtime. I do a pretty good job, especially in the mornings. I’d guess that I manage to get out 330-340 days each year. Even when we travel, I get my early morning walks in. It was on one such…
In a recent meeting, a vendor was speaking to a large group of people with mixed technical experience. They mentioned “blob storage” and I felt compelled to interject for the benefit of those folks who’d never heard the term that despite sounding like a warehouse for Hollywood 1950s B-movie props, blob storage was, for our…
I am not a casual user of profanity, obscenity, or vulgarity. Despite being surrounded by people and media where casual use is de rigueur, I choose not to use it. It doesn’t bother me much when I hear it used, and I don’t mind it in TV shows and movies, although I appreciate the cleverness of…
Some books are like the pebbles that start an avalanche. John Adams by David McCullough was one such pebble for me. In the late spring of 2001, one could not walk into the Book Star near the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevards without seeing row after row of hardcover editions of John Adams arrayed at the front…
I wasn’t going to post anything today. I felt I should deliberately not post anything to avoid getting fixated on a streak. But I did want to remind folks that Episode 3 of my new series, “Shelf-Life,” is coming out tomorrow morning. I think I did pretty well this week, considering how busy things have been. I…
I have this terrible propensity to build up systems because the systems offered off-the-shelf seem inadequate for my needs. When I used Evernote, I couldn’t just use it “off-the-shelf” so to speak, I had to build systems around it. When I started using Obsidian, I did the same. In the days when I wrote in Google Docs, I…
Software developers using lower-level languages sometimes resort to using a memory region known as a stack. A stack functions on a LIFO or last-in, first-out principle. You push something onto the stack, and then you push something else onto the stack, and you can’t get to the first thing until you pop the top thing…
One of the joys of magazines is the variety they provide. They are like old radio stations, where you can flip through channels to listen to a particular flavor of music, but are also limited to the music they play. Once and a while, a favorite band plays a new song, and it is exciting.…