I saw some debate online recently about whether or not it is rude to an author not to finish a book of their that you start. I don’t think it’s rude. It’s pragmatic. Not every book works for every reader. Time is limited. So one must spend that time wisely. For me, that sometimes means…
Despite it being a Sunday today, it was a Monday 27 years ago, on October 17, 1994, my first day with the company that I still work with today. When I was 27 years old, I had already been with the company for 5 years. Four years ago, I had been with the company longer…
Here are five more interesting reads I’ve come across recently. “Essay: The digital death of collecting” by Kyle Chayka. A fascinating look at how digital media is killing the concept of “collections” as maintainable things under your control. (Fortunately, I looked at the bookshelves that surround me in my office after reading this and felt a sense…
For those who don’t follow along on Twitter or my Facebook page, I post a link to “retro post” once-a-day, selecting from one of the thousands of posts I’ve written here on the blog over the last 15+ years. Here are the retro posts for this week. 10/10/21: Letters vs. Email (2018) 10/11/21: Going Paperless: An Epilogue (2017)…
I finished reading The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski on Thursday. If you’re a regular reader here you’ve probably heard me mention it several times over the last week or so. The book is a collection of 100 essays, each about a player that Posnanski has rated in his own way, to form a list…
Last week I told the story of the project manager and the passports. This week, I want to add sequel. In order to do this, we need to go back in time a few months. In early June I began looking into how long it takes to get a passport renewed. With COVID, nothing is…
When I work on UI design for applications I build at work, I try to make it so that the system won’t allow users to make mistakes. I don’t show fields that aren’t absolutely necessary, or options within those fields that aren’t needed for some important function in the context of what is being done.…
Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. In the first episode in this series, I discussed the basic objects in Obsidian: notes and documents. In this episode, I want to step back and talk more broadly about Obsidian itself. In order to…