I was never a sports guy, but through high school and college I managed to stay half-way informed about football and watched at least a few games a year. I could even hold my own for a few minutes of sports small talk. These days, I’m totally disconnected from that world. Here I will offer some reasons on why that might be and why I really just can’t get into football anymore.
I like to hear birds singing. It’s one of my favorite things about the house I now live in — outside, you can often hear birds chirping wonderfully. But is this just a happy illusion? Is nature really just a cruel place, a dog-eat-dog world, after all?
I’ve never liked stock photos and videos, but AI has made them even worse.
Me he dado cuenta de que hay muchas palabras en español que relaciono con una persona o un evento distinto. Es decir, cuando veo la palabra, una persona en particular viene a la mente, generalmente la persona que me enseñó la palabra, aún si tal persona nunca se dio cuenta.
Lately, I’ve had the song “A Long December” by Counting Crows stuck in my head. I used to hear it on the radio all the time back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, when I still listened to radio. I love it. The song makes me notalgic for California, even though I’ve never even visited there.
I hate the phrase “new normal” and I hate the general way in which COVID or reaction to COVID changed our lives. But one thing about this brave new world I do approve of is the trend toward working from home.
Over the last week, I took advantage of the Christmas break to read Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us”), an encyclical letter by Pope Francis that came out in October of this year. It is a meditation on devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
I just rewatched The Matrix. It has always been a favorite of mine, but the last two times I’ve watched it, I’ve been left with an uneasy feeling. The Matrix has come to represent in my mind false beliefs that predominate in the second millennium and are very gnostic in nature.
Blake picked out this song for me as part of a “song swap” exercise, where we exchange songs we like and share our gut reactions. You can see his take on a Karl Jenkins piece I shared with him here.
Here, I offer some pros and cons to the online Scrabble games I've tried and reflect on some ideas I have for making my own Scrabble clone website, and potentially other board games, with friends.
As a web developer who works mainly with PHP, I’ve been experiencing the excruciating slog that is upgrading from version 7.4 to 8+. Among the many backward incompatibilities, the one that keeps rearing its ugly head the most by far is the new E_WARNING for trying to access an undefined key on an array.
I have a love-hate relationship with technology in general and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular. Or I should say, a hate-love relationship, because I find myself hating these things by default and loving them only out of necessity. Like a relationship being maintained only out of convenience.
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about my personal life, so I figured it’s time for an update.
It took me almost exactly ten months, but I finally finished a great spiritual classic called The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus.
A while back, I read The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Here are some reflections and notes.
During the month of November, my wife Anna and I participated in our second GitHub Game Off challenge, where you have 30 days to build a video game on the platform of your choosing.
My father always sought to teach me to be brave, to learn new things, and to not be too shy or timid, for which I will always be thankful.
I came up with some swanky alternatives to corporatese with English from a bygone era. Maybe the first of future installments.
Benefits for using a "manually" installed, traditional (L)AMP local development environment.
I got the Pfizer vaccine today.
Our grandmother, whom we have always affectionately called Mimi, taught us a lot throughout our lives.
Today officially marks 10 years for me as a Catholic. Several months before Easter of that year, I began the standard classes called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults at St. Joseph in Starkville, MS. Two years before that, around spring and summer of 2007, I first began to be drawn to the Catholic faith, even though I knew almost no Catholics with whom religion was a topic of conversation.
TV will save us from wickedness!
So, I finally switched from Apple to Linux, something I’d been planning to do for a while. I thought it would be of interest to share my reasons for switching and what I think after being on Linux for about the past month.
I recently re-watched one of my favorite Coen brothers films, “No Country for Old Men” and liked it so much on this second viewing that I started reading the original novel by Cormac McCarthy.
I discovered the technique
of using functionality plugins several months ago and was reluctant at first.
When building a site with WordPress using my own theme, I usually just dump any
custom functionality I want into the functions.php file. But the idea
with functionality plugins is that you put non-theme-specific code into a plugin
instead. This prevents your code from being overridden when changing themes.
It’s been a long time waiting for a lot of red tape to clear up and a surgery to undergo (one year and four months, to be exact), but today my brother and I finally got our first dose of Spinraza (nusinersen), the first drug approved to treat spinal muscular atrophy.
One of the first things I had to do as a newly minted web developer was make elements on the page reactive beyond what I could do with my months of study of JavaScript and jQuery. I was introduced to Knockout and Vue at around that time, and I’ve tinkered a little with React.
I haven’t been updating this blog much for the last two years, partly because it’s a blog and that’s what you do with blogs, and partly because I’ve spent the last two years doing a lot of things and making a lot of changes to my life, personal and professional.
The late French philosopher Rene Girard was known for his theory of mimetic desire — that we desire something after seeing someone else desire it, then fight over it, then find a scapegoat to blame all the aftermath on so that we can go back to being at peace with one another.
Lately, I’ve been reading The Harvard Classics when I get a chance, and I am currently on Volume 10, which is The Wealth of Nations, the foundational treatise spelling out the classical principles of free trade and commerce. Written between the years 1766 and 1776 by the English philosopher Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations is one of those classics that remind you why you read the classics.
I have a confession to make. Back when I was a rather young and ignorant intern at WLBT in Jackson, the only things I was trusted with besides eating donuts was writing the simple, one-line teasers before the commercials and an occasional filler-story summarizing a national news piece from the “wire” (love saying that).
There’s an inside joke about the big Methodist church on the corner of Henderson and Siwell, just a couple of minutes from my family’s house in Byram, Mississippi. A friend of mine, with her usual sarcastic New Jersey sense of humor, called it Six Flags over Jesus when we passed by it one day. The name stuck despite its irreverence.
This is a question that comes up often between my friends and me. In fact, it has come up twice with two different friends just this past week.
I know just enough about computers and programming to be dangerous. My brother would correct me and say I don’t know anything about programming, because HTML and CSS doesn’t count, he says. It’s markup. Nevertheless, I like to fancy that when I write these posts and when I make HTML ebooks, I am programming.
I’ve got a lot of projects in the oven right now, including learning French, preparing for what I want to do for a proposal/dissertation, working a content management job, doing creative writing, learning Chinese, going to church like I’m supposed to, etc. I’m not very organized, and some projects and commitments seem to slip slowly but surely to that dark place known as the Great and Terrible Back Burner.
“I well know what temptations are, and that one of the greatest of them is to put it into a man’s head that he can write a book and have it printed, and thereby earn as much fame as money and as much money as fame.” — Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote II, prologue)
They say aspartame can kill us. I’ve always loved the blue packet myself, especially after I came down with diabetes in the summer of 2010.
It sounds like a cheapskate move. I am aware of this, but let me explain.
Back years ago, my grandparents used to reminisce about the days when Pawpaw was a traveling ironing board salesman. I’m not sure about the details, since I wasn’t around back then, but apparently one of Pawpaw’s first jobs as a married man was to go around door to door selling ironing boards. It didn’t last long, and it doesn’t seem like my grandmother, whom I call Mimi, ever took it very seriously and was glad when he finally got off the idea.
I hope you like my blog. I will post periodically and share on Facebook things that I am doing with my life and some creative writing.