Updated Spanish to English Dictionary for Kindle

Posted on May 11, 2012
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A German hacker named Marc Sturm has taken my original free Kindle Spanish to English translation dictionary and improved it for current models of Kindles. At this point, my original version is deprecated and there is no real reason not to use his. Nice work, Marc! Thank you.

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Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for March 22, 2012 – “Groaning Queues of Fun”

Posted on April 4, 2012
Filed Under audio | 1 Comment

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, March 22, 2012. This episode is again one recorded in my car. I talk about how my entertainment life is now completely dominated by queues in every medium I consume and how that eliminates the urgency to see any piece of content; I discuss how Amazon Prime Streaming of video alters my whole approach to TV; I also talk about the working middle-class midlist writers that make up most of the authors I know personally and how I am totally perplexed by their approach to the changes in publishing.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:


 

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Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for February 20, 2012 – “Haters and Conventions”

Posted on March 3, 2012
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Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, February 20, 2012 (yes, it took me almost two weeks between recording and posting.) This episode is another of a new format recorded in my car. I briefly discuss where I am in the LetterMo challenge; I talk about the notion of “haters” vs legitimately disliking something with the specific example of the Comic Book Men TV show; I talk about which SF and comics conventions I’ll be attending in 2012 and which ones I had to decline; I backtrack a little into my history in various fandoms and talk about the way friendship can flourish even when you rarely see people.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:

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Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for February 20, 2012 – “Haters and Conventions”

Posted on March 3, 2012
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Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, February 20, 2012 (yes, it took me almost two weeks between recording and posting.) This episode is another of a new format recorded in my car. I briefly discuss where I am in the LetterMo challenge; I talk about the notion of “haters” vs legitimately disliking something with the specific example of the Comic Book Men TV show; I talk about which SF and comics conventions I’ll be attending in 2012 and which ones I had to decline; I backtrack a little into my history in various fandoms and talk about the way friendship can flourish even when you rarely see people.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:

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Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for February 20, 2012 – “Haters and Conventions”

Posted on March 3, 2012
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Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, February 20, 2012 (yes, it took me almost two weeks between recording and posting.) This episode is another of a new format recorded in my car. I briefly discuss where I am in the LetterMo challenge; I talk about the notion of “haters” vs legitimately disliking something with the specific example of the Comic Book Men TV show; I talk about which SF and comics conventions I’ll be attending in 2012 and which ones I had to decline; I backtrack a little into my history in various fandoms and talk about the way friendship can flourish even when you rarely see people.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:


 

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Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for February 6, 2012 – “Write Me, Flattr Me”

Posted on February 7, 2012
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Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, circa February 6, 2012. This episode was recorded standing on a chilly and windy beach. I have two main topics – suggesting that podcasters and specifically podcasters of my circle should bum rush the Flattr system and talking about The Month of Letters Challenge, aka #LetterMo.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:


 

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LetterMo 2012

Posted on February 2, 2012
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LetterMo 2012

I was lucky enough to have made the acquaintance of Mary Robinette Kowal at Orycon 2006, when we were on several panels together. I’ve followed her ever since and noted with interest the project she began talking about a few weeks ago, The Month of Letters Challenge. It’s not unlike NaNoWriMo but the idea is to write and send a letter each mail day in the month of February. There are 24 mail days in the month, so 24 letters.

As it happens, for years I have had the idea of creating little collage postcards and mailing them to my friends. My idea was to do one each weekend and mail to a friend with whom I had fallen out of contact. The person I always thought should have been the first recipient was my friend Thomas Peake, who is now sadly the late great Thomas Peake. Thomas was always a guy for creating things, especially interesting physical artifacts. He taught me how to screen print t-shirts (some of which I still have and wear), he used to print up his own zines and the like. This idea appealed to me precisely because it was physical. Much of what I have done in the last decade is digital, electronic and ephemeral. I liked the idea of getting glue on my fingers and dropping in the post a little physical thing that will show up at someone’s house in their mailbox. It is old fashioned and nostalgic and the opposite of how we do things nowadays.

I had this idea maybe five years ago, but it wasn’t until Mary began posting her challenge to social networking sites that I began action. It was just enough of a shove to get me out of my inertial rut and moving. This is now underway. I mailed the first one today, to Mary herself. That seemed like a reasonable enough place to start. The next is going out tomorrow. I am tending to prepare them a day ahead, mainly because I want to keep a scan of them for myself. Part of the challenge is that you don’t write them ahead of time. You write one per day. I am, however, making the collages several days ahead of time and leaving them blank until time for the letter.

A wrinkle I decided to add is a QR code on each of them that points back to this post. If you were the recipient of one of these cards and reading this post, please leave me a quick comment below. It seems like a weird and interesting way to bridge the loop between the online and off, the slow deliberate postal system and the immediate global internet. I’m all for weird hybrids of interesting projects, especially the kind that helps keep me in touch with my friends.

Even if you don’t start on February 1st, if you want to join in either because you received a letter from someone (maybe me) or it just seems fun, please do. Start whenever you like, count off 24 mail days and get to it. Life is short, friends are too scarce and now is the only time we ever have. Off we go into the future, you and me and everyone. Let’s make it what we want of it.

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Flattr and Free Money For You

Posted on January 19, 2012
Filed Under digital-lifestlye, podcasting | 3 Comments

This blog has been been Flattr enabled for close to two years. I still think Flattr is a great idea and I’d love to see it get wider adoption, both from the content creator side as well as the consumer let-me-give-you-money side. Thanks to the fine folks at Flattr, there is a scheme to help prime the pump and get the idea out there. You can follow the above link to find out more about it, or just go to Flattr directly. It’s basically a micropayment scheme that hides the micropayments from you as if it were a Digg/Reddit liking scheme and is pretty darn clever.

I am pleased to be able to offer free money to the first 100 people who respond to this offer. Email me at dave@evilgeniuschronicles.org and let me know you want the free money, and they will send you a voucher code that will add €4 (that’s Euros, Americans) to your account. This is not a random amount, it’s two even months of their minimum contribution. It would be great if you could throw me a click or two, but it is entirely not compulsory. Do what you want, friends. It’s your money, free and clear. Just be aware it might be a few days because I’m batching together emails. If you don’t get the voucher immediately don’t worry, it’s my fault not theirs.

The one podcast in my listening list that I know is Flattr enabled is Thomas Gideon’s The Command Line. It would be great if you could throw him a click or two as well, but again, your money. Just for fun, I believe I’ll start collecting together a wiki type podcast directory for those who do have Flattr on them. Because of the current state of critical mass it can be a challenge to find stuff to click on, so I’ll see if I can’t help a little with that. I do encourage bloggers and podcasters to sign up and put the badge on your site. Let’s see if we can’t spread some money around to each other.

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Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for January 17, 2012 – “World Records”

Posted on January 19, 2012
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Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, circa January 17, 2012. This episode is one of a new format recorded in my car, but sounds better than I would have expected. I talk about having the longest running podcast (once this gets published); I talk about finishing the first draft of my novel and doing small amounts of work consistently over time; how to try to get more podcasts done and how to get through life. It’s a short one, trying to get in a new groove.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:


 

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Cold Brewed Coffee: Full Batch #1

Posted on December 18, 2011
Filed Under misc | 2 Comments

Cold Brew Coffee Setup

Here is the result of my first experiment in cold brewing coffee. The picture attached is my actual setup from my actual kitchen.

I used 2 cups of beans with 8 cups of filtered water out of our faucet Pur system. I’d never ground that much bean at one time, and realized that it just barely fits in the receptacle. I might well do it in halves next times. I reused the plastic container from a 2.5 pound mixed nuts tub from Costco and the water and grounds just barely fit in this. I chose to put in half the water first, spoon the ground coffee in, and then fill it back up. I didn’t want to have clumps of coffee stuck to the bottom of the container, and I didn’t want to just dump it all in, also to avoid clumping. After putting in the coffee, I filled it up with the rest of the water and very gingerly stirred it up to avoid splashing it out. When that was done, I screwed on the lid tight and let it sit overnight for about 14 hours.

The worst part of the whole process of the full-sized batch was the logistics of filtering the coffee. I put in a basket coffee filter from an old coffee pot, which didn’t quite fill up the strainer and set the strainer on this big glass bowl. On first pour, a giant lump of grounds fell into the strainer, overflowed the filter paper and went everywhere. Three seconds into filtering, I had an unacceptable level of grounds in the liquid. I dumped the filter paper, rinsed out the strainer, dumped the contents of the bowl back into the tub and washed out the bowl. Having returned the liquid back into the tub, I tried filtering agin more carefully this time. It worked fine but I had to go very slowly to avoid overflowing the coffee filter inside the strainer. There were enough grounds that I had to empty the filter one more time in the middle and put in a third and final coffee filter. When it was finally in, I tamped the grounds down a little with the spatula, dumped the grounds and transferred the contents of the bowl into the pitcher. As I poured it in, the liquid in the pitcher bubbled in an interesting way. I have no idea what was happening chemically but it looked really cool. Before I put it in the refrigerator, I poured myself the first cup, added water and heated it. It tasted great.

I bought the strainer and the pitcher from Dollar General to avoid putting coffee funk in any of our existing pitchers. I’m hoping the pitcher seals relatively well. It remains to be seen how well this will keep over time but I am being optimistic until it is proved otherwise to me. The total outlow in materials was under $7 and if the experiment ever stops, all of the stuff I bought can be used generally in the kitchen. I had looked at things like the Toddy T2N Cold Brew System but didn’t want to either spend that money or put more kitchen gadget crap in our house. Assuming that the concentrated coffee tastes as good at the end of the pitcher as it did at the beginning, I’ll call this a big success. I’m worried about oxidation and/or reaction with the plastic of the pitcher, but will assume it is good until it stops tasting good.

The only part of the process I don’t like is the filtering. I think the first adjustment I’ll make is to ditch the coffee filter. I will either get a pack of the huge filters they use in restaurant coffee makers or just line the strainer with paper towels and call it good. Longer term what I’d like to do is somehow rig together some way of taking two of those lids from the nut tubs, cutting out the middles and putting a filter between them and then affixing them together securely. If I had that, what I would do is to steep with a solid lid, then screw on the filtering lid and a second empty tub on the other top of it. Then I’d just turn the whole thing over like an hourglass and let it drip until it stops. That would be way less trouble than what I went through, would eliminate dirtying up the glass bowl and would keep the whole “dirty” part of the process in disposable bits that can be thrown away at will. We buy those tubs of mixed nuts periodically anyway, so we have a steady supply of them.

All in all, this has been fun. I’ve enjoyed playing with the process and tasting the results. I’m calling this a provisional success. If the concentrate fails to hold up, I’ll get a better storage mechanism. Other than that and the possible filter improvements, I’m good with what I have. Onward to a coffee full future!

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Cold Brewed Coffee

Posted on December 16, 2011
Filed Under misc | 2 Comments

making cold brewed coffee

I recently started an experiment in cold brewed coffee. I heard Nathan Lowell talking about it on this episode of the Living Proof Brew Cast and I went for it. The recipe I used is here.

I’d like to say that my motivation is for the perfection of the coffee. The truth is that I more like the aspect of having concentrate that I can reconstitute and microwave that won’t taste like ass. We brew decaf in my house and over the weekend I get caffeine withdrawal headaches. At work we have a Keurig machine. While I’d never claim it is delicious, I do appreciate the convenience of making coffee cup by cup and the lack of workplace coffee pot drama. I have considered getting one for the house but the cold brewed coffee tastes much better to me.

I’ve gone ahead and bought some infrastructure for the brewing. There are kits but I just bought a strainer and a big pitcher to dedicate to this. I also modified the recipe slightly as it calls for 1/2 pound of beans and I have no scale. Instead I will grind 2 cups of beans and use 8 cups of water. The internet tells me one pound of roasted beans is 4.4 cups so my modification scales both down coffee and water by approximately 10%. Tonight I’ll brew my first full scale batch instead of my small test ones. It should be fun and I hope it is tasty.

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Smartphone Upside

Posted on December 14, 2011
Filed Under digital-lifestlye, life | 2 Comments

I upgraded to a smartphone (Android, not iPhone) kicking and screaming. However I will admit that being able to blog from my phone in a dark room with a sleeping baby on top of me is pretty sweet.

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An Interview with Me

Posted on December 7, 2011
Filed Under podcasting | Leave a Comment

A few months back this was posted but in the low blogging summer of 2011 I forgot to ever post it. Paul Fischer of the Balticon Podcast interviewed me there a few years ago, and it was recently posted. We talk a lot about life engineering, optimizing on happiness, new media and other fun stuff. Give it a listen!


 

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Kindle Spanish to English Dictionary Source Files

Posted on December 1, 2011
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For approaching two years, people have been asking for the source files to my free Kindle Spanish to English dictionary. I have been stalling because those files are a non-understandable mess and I didn’t have the bandwidth to get them in releasable shape. Well, I decided to just put them up in unreleasable shape. You can find them in my repository at github.

In the years since I first did this, my hack of consuming the JSON files directly from the Google Translate ajax handler no longer works. Someone at Google got wise to that trick. There are now Google Translate APIs and they are sadly some of the non-free ones. I need to update the scripts to use those APIs, to generalize them so one can easily create any translation dictionary from any language to any other. With luck, I might have some time over the holidays. I’m accepting patches if someone wants to go nuts and do that work themselves.

People have been asking at a steady clip for these files ever since I first published my dictionary. Now they are there. Knock yourselves out, kids.

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Android App Test

Posted on December 1, 2011
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This is a test of the wordpress android app from my new HTC smartphone (yes, I joined 2007. Reluctantly.)

If you can see this, all is well. No need to panic citizens.

Digital Vs. Physical Goods

Posted on November 29, 2011
Filed Under digital-lifestlye | 1 Comment

Not long ago, I posted about how paper books are now the deprecated choice in my household. Recently, as my daughter began crawling and pulling up, she wreaked havoc on our CD rack, throwing disks all over the place. Cleaning them up and moving them to somewhere safe, I was struck with how many of them I couldn’t remember playing in the last decade. I was even more struck with the desire to get a number of these out of my house.

I am forming a new three-tiered approach on how to deal with goods that I could just as easily have in physical or digital form. This is still a work in progress but looks to be something like the following:

  1. Goods that I for sure want to own physically

    These are items that have been autographed, items that are collectible, items that have sentimental value such as heirlooms or gifts.

  2. Goods that I for sure want to own digitally

    These are the things I now buy (or download for free) to my Kindle or for my MP3 player. This is the category of things that I actively don’t want a physical copy in my living space, even if I get it for free.

  3. Goods that I am ambivalent about their physical vs digital ownership

    This is the new category that I realized shlepping CDs around. Many of these CDs are ones that I should do what many of my friends did 10 years ago, which is to rip them digitally, put them on a safe backup drive somewhere (or the cloud) and get the hell rid of the physical disk. If and when Ion Audio ever releases their book scanner, many of the books that are in my house would also fit in this category. These are goods that I currently own in physical form that if and when I could convert that do a digital form, I’d gladly get rid of the artifact. I’m going to take a wild stab and say for either books or music, between 30 and 50% of what I own would fall inside this category.

I love the idea of the DIY Book Scanner project and godspeed to them, but I’m not handy enough to build on myself. That’s why I’d rather trade $150 to Ion Audio to get a prebuilt production model of something that appears to be based off the open design. If I get one, I will go on a spree of digitizing books, putting them on a backup drive and my Kindle and either listing on eBay or donating to my local library’s book sale.

Interestingly, when I get a Kindle Fire and install the Comixology app, [Update: I'm told Comixology comes pre-installed on the Fire] I’ll have a new category of entertainment that is governed by these three tiers. I can totally see the books I currently buy one copy of issue #1 at my local comic shop to try out migrating over to Comixology. If it turns out I don’t like the book, I’ve figured that out more cheaply. For the books I do like, I’ll add them to my pull list and possibly go back and get the earlier issues in paper if I care.

One of the aspects of myself I like the least and most would like to change is my pack rat behavior. Whatever in my life I can move from a pile in my messy office to a file on a hard drive or a device, that is a positive trade to me. Dear digital world, help save me from myself.

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Decision Fatigue

Posted on November 28, 2011
Filed Under life | 2 Comments

I’m still catching up on the unblogged items from throughout 2011, aka “The Year Lost to A Tiny Human.” Here is one from last August that I’ve been thinking about for months.

According to this article in the New York Times, there is a phenomenon called “Decision Fatigue.” I can’t attest directly to the science or the reportage of the science, but I do know in my life I feel like this is a big issue. In our modern first world lives, every single day I am asked to make dozens of decisions over and over that I don’t really care about. According to the article, each one of those whether profound or trivial is using up a bit of your store of “decision making mojo” (term coined by me, TM.)

A trivial example of this from the average lunchtime is this – compare going to Subway to Jimmy Johns. In either case, you walk out with a fairly similar sandwich. All told, you get more food for cheaper at Subway, but I prefer the experience of going to Jimmy Johns. Why? Because I walk in to Jimmy Johns and tell them I want a #6. I even make a substitution, deli mustard for mayonaiise but when I place that order, that is the end of it. I hand them money and shortly get a sandwich handed back to me. I can order three or seven, and the experience is the same. Contrast that to the Subway experience. Going to the head of the line at Subway is like being interrogated at the station house.
“What sandwich do you want?”
“What bread?”
“What size?”
“What cheese?”
“Do you want this toasted?”
“Which toppings?”
Even if you say ‘the works’, you still get asked “Do you want the jalapenos? How about the banana peppers?”
“What sauces?”
“Chips and a drink?”
“How about a cookie?”

By the time this experience is over, I’m exhausted from having to answer all of these frigging questions when truth be told, I don’t give much of a shit about any of it. You could hand me my sandwich on any bread, with any cheese, and with any permutation of toppings and I’d feel about the same about it. Scale this up to across your whole life all day, and it begins to get abrasive.

Recently we went to get photos of the baby taken at the mall, and we had not even thought about Santa being there. We’d already had a photo session when we saw the Santa stand and decided to do that one too. I didn’t even think hard about the options, I went straight for the top package with the most stuff. The reason was that the few dollars in savings mattered less to me than making an arbitrary decision I didn’t care about and trying to decide right there on the spot whether it was better to have 3 5X7 vs 4 5X7 and whether it was better to make a tradeoff on wallet sized. Further, the purchasing experience at JC Penney’s Photo Studio is such that they take photos and then 2 minutes later you have to make all decisions about which and how many to purchase, and if you don’t decide right that second the price skyrockets from $4 to $10 a sheet. It’s kind of a gross and unpleasant user experience but not at all atypical in modern American consumer driven society.

One of the things I do on a small scale is the invariant ordering at certain places. When I go to Starbucks, I get an Americano 99.5% of the time. I get the same sandwich at Jimmy Johns every time, and at most restaurants I frequent I have a small set of go-to options. For me personally, I’m happy to trade off variety for simplified decisions. In those places where I am a regular customer with invariant ordering, after a while they learn my choices. I’ve had my Jimmy Johns sandwich (with correct condiment substitution) waiting for me on the counter because they saw me parking my car and started making it. My regular Starbucks will often bring my drink to my table without us ever exchanging a word, which is fun because the beach tourists always look confused over how a guy who never ordered at all got a drink ahead of them.

I’m not telling anyone how to live their life, but if you are in the business of trying to shake money out of American consumers, you might want to consider the best ways to streamline decisions out of the process. Every one of them is a roadblock that might abort the transaction entirely. Think of the ways to reduce the whole transaction to “Yes, I want it” and then boom it is done. Amazon is particularly good at this. What is “one click ordering” if nothing but “decision free checkout process?” Brilliant.

Testing ThinkUp

Posted on November 22, 2011
Filed Under digital-lifestlye | Leave a Comment

Just today I ran across a reference to ThinkUp and on whim I installed it on my hosting account. This is a way for you to keep your own local cache of Twitter, Facebook and Google+ (so far.) It is open source and with luck will continue to have features added for some time. I have been using Twitter for nothing but the auto-posts from this blog for some time now. It’s possible that having ThinkUp available will make me willing to use Twitter again. Also possible that it doesn’t. It does solve one of the very annoying parts of Twitter, that you post things and eventually they plop out the memory hole and into the crapper.

My first thought was that ThinkUp really needs a generic RSS plugin as well as plugins for some of the big services. My second thought was that all it really needs is a plugin to read FriendFeed and then all of the rest of it is taken care of. if I contribute any code, that might be the code I’m willing to do.

My ThinkUp instance is here. I’ve made the Twitter and G+ streams public, and for G+ and Facebook only posts that are made fully public get imported. I have to remember while using G+ that anything I want to prevent bubbling into the open internet needs to be more restricted than Public. It remains to be seen how useful this wil be, but it looks promising for now. I had thought of doing something similar with the Drupal Activity Stream module except that it looks abandoned now and has no Drupal 7 version available. I’ll see how this works for me and report back later.

Update: As a bonus, I’ll put the embed code for my most recent post here. I honestly have no idea what it is going to do. We can learn together.

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Pragmatic Programmers Black Friday Sale – Now with Dropbox Support!

Posted on November 21, 2011
Filed Under books | Leave a Comment

On Friday, here’s a Black Friday sale you can take advantage of without having to find a parking place. Pragmatic Programmers will be having 40% off of all their books for that one day only. I’ve been a customer of theirs for some time, having bought a number of Ruby books that I have read on my Kindle. If you purchase either the ebook or ebook/paper combo, you can get the books in DRM-free ePub or MOBI. Use them with whatever device you might happen to have.

I recently made an order with no coupon, so I’m pretty good on their books at the moment. However, I think I’ll buy Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby: Control Your Computer, Simplify Your Life by David Bryant Copeland. I am doing an ever larger set of command line Ruby scripting, mostly without any sort of automated testing at all just eyeball verification. If I get get out of this book some best practices for testing these scripts, that would be well worth the $12 it will cost after coupon.

Also, in going to the site to assemble these links I just learned something completely new and cool. Pragmatic Programmers now has Dropbox support. They periodically update books that you have purchased, and you can configure your account to have them update your books via Dropbox whenever a newer version is available. That is a killer feature. I’m off to set that up right now.

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Blog Fodder and Life

Posted on November 19, 2011
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Our baby was born last January. It’s amazing how much came to a grinding halt then and has never come back. I have seen no television since then except for maybe 4 hours total of college football and a few hours of NASCAR races. I just looked at my Google Reader under my tag “Blog fodder.” I had been using that to tag entries I might later want to blog about here. The last entry in there was dated December 2010. I don’t know how far behind I am in reading my GR items but I’d guess three or four months.

None of this is a complaint. If anything it is the opposite. One of the many gifts the baby gave me is showing me that parts of my life that were major time sinks can completely disappear and I will barely miss them. I had already had the goal to jettison some of the fast twitch parts of my online life (Twitter being a prime one) before she was born, but after she was born it was no longer a choice or intention. Having a baby – especially at our ages – is the equivalent of on Star Trek when the captain says “Life support only!” It doesn’t matter what you want, you do what is physically possible for you.

I’m calmer and happier now, even with the exhaustion and stress of keeping this small being alive whose primary goal is to do dangerous activities. Life is good, even as far less of it occurs on the internet. It’s quite possible it is because far less of it is happening on the internet.

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