Note: This post is the first in a new series of posts describing ark, a command-line-based personal archive system I have developed and am using as my primary archiving tool. If you are not interested in this type of tech post, feel free to skip it. For those who are interested, a plan to provide…
The mail arrives, and rather than be full of junk ads for political campaigns, insurance companies, and furniture far too rich for my blood, it comes with three or four personalized advertisements for this college or that one. They are not addressed to me or Kelly, but rather to Zach, who, a year from now,…
My girls convinced me to take them to a local Barnes & Noble because they were searching for something called a Squeezy Squishy toy — or something like that. So we braved the unseasonably cool, dreary, rainy weather to drive the short distance to our nearby B&N so that they could seek out their treasure.…
As I wrapped up my work yesterday, I looked around my home office and flashed back to my home office 30 years earlier. My “office” back then was a desk in a small one-bedroom Studio City apartment, with a single 3-shelf bookcase. Today, my office is a room off the living room, a former sun…
Isaac Asimov died 34 years ago today. 30 years ago today, inspired by Asimov’s lifelong habit of keeping a diary, I started my own diary habit, one that continues today. I woke up this morning and headed into my office, looking at the shelf of reference books beside my desk. In addition to half a…
I bought for myself, as a belated holiday gift, a brand new Royal Scriptor II Portable Electric Typewriter. I’ve been yearning for a working typewriter for at least a year now. What finally pushed me to make the purchase was my recent realization that I’ve spent at least a third of my life for the…
Over the December holidays, I read Louis Menand’s article on dictionaries, “Look It Up” in The New Yorker. The article referred to a book by Stefan Fatsis, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary and who can resist a book on dictionaries? So, sitting poolside, I read Fatsis’s book with pleasure and…
Today marks the completion of 30 years of keeping track of the list of books I’ve read. Yesterday, I finished my 84th book of 2025, which also happened to be my 1,500th book since I began keeping my list. The book was C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution I began the…
I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. They seem, at my age, arbitrary. Things that a person can start at any time, they put off to the first day of the year, along with many other people. For me, the question is: why wait? That said, I do look at personal trends and things always…