• Writing Style

    14 May 2022 » 3 min read

    When I started to write with the idea of submitting stories, way back in late 1992, I never thought consciously about style. Instead, I attempted to imitate the styles of those writers who I read regularly. At the time, this was Piers Anthony, whose books I’d been reading since the mid-1980s1. I suppose this is…

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  • Deck Work

    13 May 2022 » 2 min read

    Spring was slow to arrive here in northern Virginia. In March we had a few days in the 60s and maybe even 70. For spring break, we headed down to Florida and before we left, the morning temperatures were pretty cold. I felt fairly confident that when we returned, mornings in the 30s would be…

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  • Ordering the News

    12 May 2022 » 3 min read

    I like to spend part of my Sunday morning reading the Sunday papers. This is different than the other days of the week that I read the “papers.” On Sunday, I get actual newspapers. Others days I read the papers on my phone. I subscribe to digital editions of the New York Times, Washington Post,…

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  • A Busy Afternoon

    11 May 2022 » 3 min read

    A couple of weeks ago we had an usually busy Saturday afternoon. Specifically: a 4 hour period in which our three kids had to be at five separate events. Zone defense was a must in this situation, but required more than that. It required a game plan. We plotted the plan out the night before.…

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  • Practically Paperless with Obsidian, Episode 29: Filling Out Forms

    10 May 2022 » 4 min read

    Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. It sometimes seems to me that most of the paper I deal with day-to-day are forms. I find this ironic. Given that so much of what we do is online, it seems almost archaic to…

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  • A Work In Progress

    09 May 2022 » 3 min read

    I don’t know about you, but I am a work-in-progress. When I was young, I’d tell myself I’d have it all figured out when I was in my 20s. In my twenties I passed the buck to my thirties. You get the picture. Still, I’d absolutely have “it” figured out by the time I turned…

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  • Digital Paragraphs: Tabs or Carriage Returns?

    08 May 2022 » 3 min read

    These days, I do all of my writing in plain text files using Obsidian. It is the first time since college that I have done all of my writing in a single place. Back in college that writing happened in Word for DOS 5.5, which is my favorite word processor of all time. Plain text…

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  • Reading for the Week of 5/1/2022

    07 May 2022 » 2 min read about Reading & Books

    Here is what I read this week. Some of the articles/posts may require a subscription to read them. I also share my recommended reads on Pocket for anyone who wants to follow along there. Books Finished John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman. I’ve only read a few le Carré novels, and his memoir, but…

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  • What’s Going On With Medium?

    07 May 2022 » 3 min read

    I don’t know what’s going on with Medium. It has become a weird echo chamber of whatever article you happen to click on. The tuning of its recommendation engine seems off. It is like someone turned a dial somewhere all the way to eleven and the results are strange to say the least. I pay…

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  • How to Improve Baseball: Trade Speed for Endurance

    06 May 2022 » 5 min read

    Baseball is something that I really enjoy. Beyond just watching a game, there is a rich history to the sport1. That history ties together generations going back to the Civil War. People playing baseball in the 19th century would recognize the game today and vice versa–or, at least, that used to be the case. Baseball…

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