I have a theory of learning, based largely on my own experience, that goes somthing like this: Elementary school taught me how to read. High school taught me how to think critically about what I read. College taught me how use those skills to learn. It seems ironic, but after passing through sixteen years of…
Staring at my books the other day, I pulled Harlan Ellison’s Slippage collection off the shelf and sat down to read my favorite Harlan Ellison story: “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore.” This story is one of a handful that I consider perfect stories. I’ve read the story five or six times and it…
Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. At a high level, I had three main requirements when I was looking for a note-taking app. I wanted an app that: Uses plain text files: first because they are accessible anywhere and require no…
There was a thread I saw on Reddit (that I can no longer locate) that asked: why take notes? The thread contained the usual answers that I’d expect to see, but it made me think about my own notetaking and I thought I’d try to answer the question here. Prior to my junior year in…
Last night (as I write this), the BBWAA voted David Ortiz into the Baseball Hall of Fame on his first ballot. As a lifelong Yankees fan, David Ortiz was often a thorn my side, but I can’t deny that he was a fantastic hitter, and given the dynasty that he played in and his offensive…
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 In Progress The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro. This is turning out to…
Over the years I have written hundreds of posts that might loosely fall into the category of “how-to” posts. Ten years ago I wrote a Going Paperless series which ended up with something like 150 episodes. Currently I am writing a Practically Paperless series. In between I’ve written posts on blogging, on writing, on coding,…
Sometime in January I began to notice those yellow-and-green heatmap like grids of 5×6 squares showing up in my Twitter and Facebook feeds. I had no idea what they were, but they reminded me of celluar automata. They seemed to replicate like celluar automata, too, because before long, it seemed like many friends and family…
Earlier today (as I write this), puppeteer, author, and audio book narrator Mary Robinette Kowal mentioned on Twitter that she’d found her first novel. She posted a picture of it, and asked everyone how their first novels were written. As you can see, hers was on legal pads that got transferred to 5-1/4-inch floppy disk.…