Category: Practical

Categories
Mood Politics Practical

In the face of despair

Mon­day morn­ing I woke up feel­ing the most despon­dent I have yet since elec­tion night. Well, since after elec­tion night. That night was pret­ty bad. But I’ve had a sort of ener­gy since then, maybe a bit man­ic, that may have been prop­ping me up. Yes­ter­day, I woke up and read the news as I […]

Categories
Me and my life Post Practical Writing

Where is this horse you speak of?

It has been a lit­tle over a month since I have writ­ten any fic­tion. Not a word. But I am get­ting back on that prover­bial horse. A lit­tle over a month ago, I was offered a half time job by a friend, and I took it. Thus a third, part-time career was born. I am […]

Categories
Me and my life Post Practical

Ow

I am forty three years old. I have been bless­ed­ly healthy all those years, with nary a seri­ous ill­ness, a bro­ken bone, nor a hos­pi­tal stay. But yes­ter­day, I had the plea­sure of my first CT scan. Let me back up. Three morn­ings ago, I had a lit­tle back pain. Then the pain shift­ed around […]

Categories
Post Practical Writing

One more month of writing

Hey all. So, it was about a month ago that I post­ed that last update on my writ­ing career. You may be won­der­ing how the writ­ing career is going. Yeah, how is the writ­ing career going? Okay. I spent this last month doing a lot of world­build­ing, which was fun. An aside for non-SF/F fans: […]

Categories
Post Practical Technology

iTunes Match Airport Wall Wart

Delight­ful name, no? I would like Apple to build a wall wart1 that con­nects to my iTunes Match account (nee, my iCloud account) to stream music. It should be very much like an Air­port Express, being wall-wartish, and hav­ing an audio out option, but it should be pur­pose built to con­nect to my music in […]

Categories
Post Practical Technology

AT&T or Verizon for my new iPhone? (Updated answer: AT&T)

Updat­ed! — dis­count on Vz, too! Update #2 — no voice+data on Vz Update #3 — done and done Hi all. Back to the mun­dane. Apple announced (or rather, con­firmed what we’ve all known for sev­er­al months now) a new iPhone today. The iPhone 5 will be avail­able for pre-order this Fri­day, to ship a […]

Categories
Me and my life Post Practical

Forty freakin’ two

Too old to be a child prodi­gy, too young to be an elder states­man. Today is my birth­day. Seri­ous thoughts on the date itself lat­er today, but for now, I just want to give a shout out to my par­ents, with­out whom I would not be here, and my fam­i­ly, with­out whom I would not […]

Categories
Meta Practical Technology

Son of a… blog

Not quite a decade ago, I forked over sev­er­al hun­dred dol­lars to sup­port a lit­tle web host­ing com­pa­ny that could, TextDrive.  In exchange, they gave me a life­time host­ing promise.  It was a good run, and they even hon­ored their promise across a cou­ple of acqui­si­tions and merg­ers. But a week or so ago, they […]

Categories
Me and my life Practical

Molting tree?

It would appear that the real­ly big sycamore in our back yard is molt­ing? Um. Help? UPDATE: I’ve been informed by peo­ple more knowl­edge­able than I that sycamore trees do this on a reg­u­lar basis. In fact, since this event, we’ve had sev­er­al more bark­falls, prob­a­bly exac­er­bat­ed by the drought this sum­mer.

Categories
Me and my life Practical

Simplify: our pre-sort laundry system

When we first moved in to our house in Lawrence, we got a pret­ty big walk-in clos­et in the mas­ter bed­room. We’d not had one like that before, and imme­di­ate­ly set about using it to sim­pli­fy our laun­dry tasks. Before this, we’d col­lect all our laun­dry in one bas­ket (occa­sion­al­ly we’d try two, whites and […]