SLC would like Christmas to come sooner. They have already decorated… the escalators?
Reading
How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens
- 11 articles totaling 44,506 words
- 14 short ebooks totaling …
versenotes
Just posted October’s behind the scenes for VerseNotes members.
Wherein I admit that, despite writing more than 19,000 words last month, I somehow still didn’t meet the insane goal I set myself—and, worse, published almost none of it.
This YouTubeTV/Disney beef is really ruining our football Saturday, and there’s no good alternative.
Adding ESPN to Disney+ costs $30/month, but you still have to keep YouTubeTV because not every game is on an ESPN network. And of course I …
Watched: Donnie Darko 🍿
Meera had never seen it, so I made it part of our spooky season movie marathon. I watched this movie a lot during college, and I had forgotten how much I love it. Also, I had totally forgotten that its timeline is centered on …
Curves to Curve By
If the exam scores are not resulting in the grades you want, then what do you do? Turn them into new scores!
My AP CS teacher used 10 × √(score), which always felt fine; it basically gave you a letter grade bump (and made it hard to …
The city has helpfully placed a giant fluorescent pink X on the sidewalk outside our house.
It means “this sidewalk tile has a crack and needs replacing,” but it looks like hobo code for some unknown information about this house (perhaps …
fiction
Fiction: A Door Stays Open (The Grudgery)
Somewhere between all the worlds, a door stays open. Outside, heroes save the day and ordinary folk grow old without ever hearing its name. Behind it, the Grudgery hums.
Nobody knows who you are in this bar. They’re too busy with their own …
I just had to replace the battery in my mouse (Logitech M720). It lasts so long that I had forgotten it wasn’t just magic, and I spent many confused minutes before realizing what had happened.
My brain has decided that today’s soundtrack is the theme song to School Rumble.
GURUGURU MAWARU
photos
versenotes
New Bible day! I heard about The Brick Bible and thought maybe it was an epic Lego set for constructing scenes from Scripture (I would spend enormous amounts of money on such a thing).
But it’s even better than that: it’s a complete Bible …
On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society
Cal Newport writes the best thing to read on the Charlie Kirk assassination. Possibly the only thing to read. (It’s wonderfully short.)
Everything else makes me worry for, well, civil society in America.
Today, I left my hotel and walked to a train, which took me to the airport.
This sounds normal, except I’m in the United States, where “walking” and “trains” are often unavailable to me when traveling.
Of course, this is ATL, so now I get the …
Just booked a tiny cabin in Colorado for a few days for Meera and me (and Tuck!). We haven’t done a retreat like this since last December, and it is way overdue.
fiction
Fiction: Gifted
My sister, aptly blogging at @QuilledSister, writes short stories on her blog. Read her stories; they’re wonderful. Every so often one of them lodges in my imagination and sends me wandering down a side path of my own. This is one of those …
photos
The mountains turned bright red yesterday during sunset.
Today’s hike was coincidentally almost exactly 5k. My time of 1:33:16 is an awful 5k, but I blame the 1,150 feet of elevation gain rather than my lack of fitness for my pace.
Consuming Media in the Right Shape
In a recent episode of his “Bookworm” podcast, Mike Schmitz said,
If you are listening to a book, you have not read the book.
He doubled down in a newsletter titled “Time to Hit the Cognitive Gym” (which, amusingly and …
Not what I expected from a post called “Ask the Algorithm”, but cleverly conceived and executed, and definitely funny.
photos
I should put more pretty pictures on the Internet. Here’s a beautifully clear shot of the mountains over the middle school where I walked Tuck yesterday. I love that I can see mountains now on our walks. #nofilter, as the kids used to say.
Trying GoAccess for Website Traffic Analysis
I’m playing with alternatives to Google Analytics, because I pretty much only look at one or two charts.
First try: GoAccess.
It lives on your server and reads the nginx logs directly and produces very nice graphs. There’s a live terminal …
Amusingly, ChatGPT on my phone has updated to GPT-5, but the Mac app hasn’t yet, which means that continuing a conversation between the two devices always means swapping models mid-stream.
Today’s Bracket City includes the amusingly redundant clue “companion for bread, often.”
“Companion” literally means “with bread.”
Com- = “with” panis = “bread”
Reading more #OnThisDay, it seems like the beginning of July 2023 changed how I thought about writing, from something I should do to something I do. I can watch my two-year-old self move from reading about systems of writing to putting them in place …
Reading More and Writing More
Two years ago today (July 5, 2023), I wrote in my daily reflection:
I’ll tell myself again that I need to read more and write more. I can do it.
Since then, I’ve published:
Went to see the F1 movie yesterday with Meera.
As an F1 fan, the cameos and references and locations were fun, and imagining how they filmed that movie was fascinating.
As a movie fan, it was a big goofy fun energy-filled summer flick that isn’t, and …