I have taken three long train rides in my life. I define “long” as being “overnight.” The first long train ride was from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. The second was from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. The third, many years later, was from Oxnard, California to Seattle, Washington. None of these train…
I am fascinated by how people work. It is part of the reason I love reading biographies. I’m always on the lookout for little nuggets of inspiration and ideas that I find when reading them. In a biography of Thomas Jefferson I learned about commonplace books. In a biography of John Quincy Adams, I stole…
When I first began using email, it was entirely text-based. I used a variant of mh mail beginning in 1994 and every now and then, after trying to do something relatively simple in my current email systems, I long for the days of mh. Here are some things I miss about the old email system:…
Why are footnotes generally composed of compound keys instead of being primary keys themselves? I’ve noticed that in most books I read that contain footnotes, the footnote renumbering restarts with each chapter. That means in order to uniquely identify a footnote you need to know the chapter and the note number. Wouldn’t it be easier…
Since I am on vacation and happened to find myself with an empty hour this afternoon, I managed to clean up my code enough to where I was willing to put my Obsidian daily notes automation script on GitHub. This is the script that I use to automate the creation of my daily notes in…
You can’t write anything on the Internet on April 1 without someone assuming it is some kind of April Fools’ Day joke. If it is good news, no one will believe you. If it is bad news, everyone will assume it is an April Fools’ Day joke. I am therefore going to write a completely…
It seems a small thing, but people are constantly misspelling my name. I think it is an unusually easy name to spell, but I’ve also had decades of experience spelling it out. It goes like this: J-A-M-I-E. I get all sorts of variants. Most common is J-A-I-M-E. After that I get J-A-I-M-I-E. It is almost…
It is a sign of our times that anytime we travel somewhere we have to take a hundred or so cables and chargers for all of the different gadgets we have to keep powered throughout the day. I’ve had to make checklists for the cables just to make sure I am taking the right kind;…
There are certain sub-genres that appeal to me more than others. Baseball history is one example. The Apollo space program is another. In each of these sub-genres I’ve read more than my fair share of books. Another sub-genre I enjoy that I have recently been revisiting is the history of computing. Perhaps because I grew…
Friday, March 26, 2021 I got the first dose of my COVID vaccine today. Being a writer, I thought I’d write about the experience, so I took notes. Kelly scheduled our appointments last week when they became widely available in our area. She scheduled her appointment at the Safeway just down the street from our…