Michael

One of the strange things about growing up in California is that seasons never seemed to be clearly defined in the traditional sense of having four distinct stages. Rather, there is the warm and dry part of the year, when the grass on the hills is a golden yellow, and the cooler wetter part of the year, when it's replaced by green. Except during severe droughts, when the green season remains partly golden yellow. I largely missed out on the colors of leaves changing in autumn - apart from very f...

Different processes work for different people and at different times. Old Research Workflow Tools OneNote - I used this in grad school with local notebooks, and briefly more recently with local notebooks synced through a third-party cloud service. It's not a bad piece of software, but I dislike its need to hook into Microsoft services (a constant annoyance with Windows). Evernote - I used this for a year or so before the program's inability to competently handle a wide range of basic tasks and...

The news relating to COVID-19 in the UK just doesn't stop, swirling and swirling about like some sort of never-ending spin cycle. It goes beyond the media coverage - NHS frontline staff being denied tests and then displaying symptoms, Tube station closures, fiscal and monetary stimulus (but too little in the former's case), the question of a universal basic income, the potential for a harder London lockdown (and finally, a long overdue announcement on that today for the entire country). It comes...

I quit Facebook (what I've called bookface for ages) at the end of 2018. I'd announced it to my contacts there about a month in advance, but apparently people either thought I was joking or didn't see the post thanks to bookface's feed algorithm. The experience itself has been quite interesting. I'd slowly weaned myself of checking in on the site over a month or so prior to deleting my account, so it wasn't like I was going cold turkey. The best part has been the way I've freed myself from a lot...

I noticed it's been about a year since I've written anything here. That's been for a number of reasons. For the most part, I've never quite been sure of what to make of this platform. How does it complement the blogging features of my personal website? And until very recently (as in, today), I also did not grasp the flexibility or customizability of Listed.to. I think the most similar platform I found to Listed.to was Write.as, which does not appear to be under active development. Anyhow, it's...

'I feel sorry for him,' my mom commented as we pulled into a spot in the parking structure for my grad-school apartment. We'd spent most of the day driving around San Diego county - I don't remember exactly what we'd seen that day - and my playlist was malfunctioning, playing Jon Foreman's 'The Cure for Pain' what seemed like every three tracks. I can't recall exactly what the previously-played song had been, but it ended on a high note and I made a joke about it, pointing out that, according to...

February hates me. Three years and three days ago, my mother passed away. And the most salient lesson I learned was that in Britain, friends are the people who kinda stick with you in the good times only to totally and completely desert you in the bad. Since pretty much all of my British friends were from an Anglican evangelical church, and I've seen the same pattern before - several times - maybe the same also holds true for evangelical Christians. I vividly remember trying to teach one last c...

I quit bookface at the end of last year. I posted a message on my wall, but it seems that bookface has become such an embedded part of life that the most common reaction was that it was a joke. I'm guessing it also didn't get much visibility because I deleted most of my network during the 2016 US presidential campaign to get away from the Trump lovers and Bernie bros; one notable component of bookface's feed algorithm is that it doesn't seem to weight social ties in anyway. Consequently, the mor...

Apparently Loch Lommond wasn't always the whisky brand for Captain Haddock. It's interesting that the actual Loch Lommond distillery opened at the same time as the name change in the Tintin books. I was really excited when I first discovered Loch Lommond, but it was a disappointment to learn that there wasn't any intentional overlap between the two! ...

Trying this out as a blogging/journaling platform... My new cello arrived today! Crafted by Wang Zhiguo this year from nicely figured 20+ year-old Bosnian maple for the back and sides and 200 year-old Chinese spruce for the top. The spruce came from beams that were part of a Qing dynasty home in Beijing that was demolished in preparation for the Beijing Olympics. ...