Late last year I set myself some goals to tackle in 2023. These goals fell into three areas in which I am seeking improvement: (1) consolidation, (2) simplification, and (3) automation. In setting those goals, I wrote the following: I believe I can get away with two primary work product formats: plain text files used…
Four lessons from four decades of note-taking In the fall, the Little Miss will be heading into 7th grade. Forty years ago, I too, was spending my summer what 7th grade would be like. In the Los Angeles Unified School District at that time, 6th grade was the last year of elementary school, while 7th…
Whenever I read a book about the encyclopedia, I am overcome by an urgent desire to read one. This is not, as it might seem, an isolated incident. It happened five years ago when I read A.J. Jacob’s book The Know-It-All in which he described the year he spent reading the encyclopedia cover-to-cover. It happened…
Late last year, I set 3 goals for myself for 2023: (1) consolidate the apps that I use; (2) simplify; and (3) automate repetitive tasks. One repetitive task I’ve been dealing with for decades is maintaining and publishing my reading list. I started keeping my reading list back in 1996 in order to track a…
Where have I been and why have things been so quiet around here? One of my real joys is writing here and it has been too long since I last took solace in this pleasure of mine. So what’s the deal? Well, I’ve had a lot of things on my plate keeping me busy: All…
I got my first house key when I was eight or nine years old. It was attached to a string which I wore around my neck, making me one of the many latch-key kids of the early 1980s. I’d walk home the short distance from school, unlock the door with my key, and then call…
I began keeping a list of all of the books I read beginning in 1996. I was almost 24 years old, and I think the inspiration to keep a list came from a list I’d seen online by someone who’d been keeping the list since 1974. I lamented the fact that I’d missed tracking twenty-plus…
If I haven’t been writing here much it is because I’ve been doing a lot of heavy reading lately. I’ve been reading a lot about artificial intelligence lately, and that led to math and physics. In there were a couple of good biographies: The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico…