Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. Recently, while browing around and older server, I unearthed some digital treasure. I found text files going back to 1994 containing about 100,000 words of my writing. Some of it was old journals, some of…
Today I learned the thrill that any treasure hunter must feel at hitting upon a find. Except that in my case, I wasn’t seeking treasure, but instead, trying to fix a problem with our Confluence server at work. Nearly 28 years ago, when I started with the company, most of my documents were Unix-based. Our…
For more than three decades spanning from the 1950s to the 1980s, my grandfather and three of his brothers owned and ran a service station in the Bronx. After they sold the station, whenever I was with my grandfather when he put gas in the car, he always pointed out the price. “See that,” he’d…
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 Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H. W. Brands. I don’t…
There are some things from the past for which I am envious. Newspapers with a morning and evening edition. Good radio programming. And mail service that was so reliable, you never thought about it. It is the good old days of reliable mail service for which I particularly pine. When I was a kid, the…
Each year, print magazines are required to publish circulation information that shows how many copies of the magazine go out on average in different categories This blog is not a magazine and there is no requirement for circulation stats, but yesterday I passed a minor milestone here on the blog that got me thinking about…
Tools tend to be standardized. There are screwdrivers made for specific types of screws. There are pencils whose lead (or graphite) has a standard darkness or hardness. Computers have standardized ports for plug-in in devices, and communication tools have standardized protocols to allow for effective messaging between points. And yet, as I have written before,…
A few years back, I came up with an original system for classifying how busy I was at a given moment. I called it my busy-ness number. It is similar to how meteorologists measure cloud-cover, except instead of clouds, I measure the coverage of the surface of my desk. I was thinking about this post…
Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. For those just joining us, one of the things I have been trying to do is to use Obsidian for all of my writing. In Episode 25 I described how I used Obsidian to manage…