Archives for category: short posts

Sofia, on seeing the tiny Android icon on my phone’s home screen this morning: “Oh! Robot!”

My master plan is proceeding very nicely.

Fun Fact of the Day: Catalunya is almost exactly the same size as Maryland (including Chesapeake Bay).

Working in my local library today, since the cleaning woman is working at home and she’s too chatty for me to get anything done. I had forgotten how much I like libraries. Just sitting in the reference section surrounded by shelves of encyclopedias full of information yet to be learned gives me a happy sense of nostalgia, thinking back to countless trips to the John McIntire Public Library in Zanesville, OH. My mom and dad did me a huge favor by introducing me to the library early, which is something I should keep in mind for Sofia.

My Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit system suddenly started hanging on startup today, insisting on running CHKDSK and then freezing as soon as it started. Luckily the same laptop also has an Ubuntu installation on it, so I booted into Ubuntu, mounted the Windows partition, and edited the registry by hand to disable the boot-time scan.

Using linux as a tool to fix my Windows installation…I’m not sure if that earns me nerd points or condemns me to a special level of hacker Hell.

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Partly a test of posting from the WordPress app for Android, and partly a reminder to look around at things while you still can.

Although it’s not the oldest content here, this is the official inaugural post of my new blog home. I’ve decided to try and simplify my digital life a bit by stepping back from Facebook, Twitter, etc. and consolidating my various online presences in one spot.

I’ve included the last couple of posts from my previous blog below, but you can still find all of those posts, at least for the time being, at the old site. Also, if you’d like to browse the previous incarnation of this site, when it was a collection of our family travelogues, you can see those too.

Without prematurely going into too much detail, there are big changes coming up for me soon, so I’ll try to keep this site updated as often as possible. The idea is to not only post long, introspective messages once a year (see my previous blog for examples), but to incorporate a little of the quick status update style of Facebook and Twitter. If you want to follow along, there is an RSS feed link at the top of the page, ready to plug into the RSS reader of your choice (personally I prefer Google Reader).

In any case, welcome, and feel free to comment or email me about anything you find here.

…or, “How Twitter, Facebook, and parenthood killed my blog.”

[this post has been migrated from my old blog, which you can still find, at least for now, here.]

I’ve been meaning to get back to posting here for a long while now, but the combination of daily commitments and the lazy appeal of two-line updates on Facebook and Twitter have made procrastinating far too easy. Eventually, though, you realize that there’s only so much you can say of any significance in 140 characters, not to mention the deleterious effects it can have on your ability to compose a coherent sentence. So, if for no other reason than to remind myself how to write in complete English words, here I am again.

While I was thinking about what the point of this blog should be, I fed the URL into a site called Wordle, which creates an artistically-arranged summary of the most common words in any web page or text. The results are pretty telling, which is to say that they tell me that I do way too much navel-gazing, and spend far too much time thinking about the past. To try and combat that, I think my goal for the blog (if it has one) will be to look more to the future than the past, and to maybe be just a little less emo.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some Dashboard Confessional tracks to listen to. Not that they can compare to The Cure…wow, I really miss The Cure.