Category: Personal

  • Journey Back, Journey On: Watching my son rediscover a comic book 4 years later

    Saturday morning. Mom’s at yoga. Dad’s puttering downstairs. 13-year-old Big Sis is hibernating — those pesky teenagers. What’s an almost-9-year boy old to do? That’s my imagination of what W, my son, was thinking after I shushed him for the fifth time when he was playing in the open area right next to where his sister’s puberty-induced coma went…

  • Two new posts on Medium.com, plus thoughts on platform proliferation

    The past week or so I’ve enjoyed writing on Medium.com. I mentioned a post about Tina Fey’s “Bossypants as Startup Bible” here before, and since then I’ve written two more: eBay’s Sublime Terror: Staring down the precipice while hunting Babylon 5 DVDs and Barnes & Noble’s real problem: In praise of chunky scale Medium.com is…

  • Ahhh– the right email filter at the right time

    Sometimes a tiny adjustment can make a huge difference. Example: I have a backup email address where copies of emails that I might otherwise miss are routed. Recently, I started using this backup email address for other things as well– a new use case. The problem, however, was that suddenly I couldn’t see the new…

  • A Modest Proposal: just do away with “marriage” as a legal concept altogether

    I support gay marriage unequivocally.  There is no however.  Gay and lesbian couples should have all the same rights as my wife and I do, and it’s a shame on the United States that this still hasn’t happened. Right now, the Supreme Court is dancing on the head of a needle with two different cases…

  • Is there life after Harry (Potter)?

    I’m Single-Dadding it for a few days whilst Kathi is teaching down in L.A., and our seven-year-old son just made me so proud that I must share. Post school, post Tae Kwon Do, post dinner (pizza, because Dad’s a little under the weather and doesn’t want to cook), I offered him the chance to finish…

  • Cathedral, or “When My Pack Rat Tendencies Come in Handy”

    I surfaced from a recent spelunking expedition through boxes in our garage with “Cathedral, The Game of the Medieval City,” a strategy game that I discovered at a Renaissance Faire somewhere between 25 and 30 year ago, bought, played, loved and eventually stuffed into a box during a move… probably to my first year in…

  • Everybody’s a Muggle in Rowling’s “A Casual Vacancy”

    As I type these words I have reached page 160 of J. K. Rowling’s new novel, “A Casual Vacancy,” so I’m about one third done and have made enough progress to know that I’ll finish the book and that I can draw early conclusions. Note: there are no plot spoilers here past the first five…

  • Short Post: ToodleDo printing woes…

    Oh ToodleDo, Oh ToodleDo, you know I love you for your sensuous tagging and sorting, for your alluring ease of task capture, and for your promiscuous spreading of my tasks across the cloud to computer, laptop, tablet and smart phone alike– you saucy service, you.  I’ve trumpeted about my love for you here, and verily…

  • 11 “Change Your Life” Productivity Apps & How to Use Them

    Note: I’ve revised and updated this post here. Over the last year or two I’ve been tweaking the suite of applications and services I use to keep my head above water– here are my 11 “Change Your Life” apps and how I use them. Please tell me about new ones in the comments. In alphabetical…

  • Mom for a Day. Oy Vey!

    My wife Kathi left to teach in L.A. this morning and so I became the POD (Parent on Duty), also known as “Substitute Mom.” That was less than 12 hours ago & I’m totally frazzled. Unlike most of my posts, this has nothing to do with media– think of it as highly individualized anthropology.  Cue…