Posts

College was a reading blight for me. I had other things to do, classes pulling my attention, and a pretty damaged ability to focus due to the introduction of a smartphone in my life. I was on-and-off reading books for fun, and felt pretty bad for accumulating books that I just was not getting to. When I was an intern the past summer, I was hoping to change that. Yet I only made it through one book. Now that I’m in my real adult life, and settled in a bit, I’ve finally boarded the reading train yet again, and it is fantastic. It kicked off with reading Neuromancer by William Gibson over the course of a couple weeks. It was touch-and-go for a while there, but I made it through and very much enjoyed it. The past few fiction books I’ve read were sci-fi or technology thrillers of some variety. But I wanted to get back to where I was in high school and early college: able and willing to read just about any book I came across, even if it wasn’t very good. So, I recalled a recommendation an acquaintance gave to me, Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. It is classified as a science fiction novel, but really is just a post-apocalyptic novel taking place in modern day, after a particularly deadly strand of swine flu wiped out most of the world. I read the book in only two days. ...

At work the other day, we had a bit of a break to celebrated the month’s birthdays. During this time – my coworkers sitting around a large table, munching on pie and ice cream – a conversation broke out. How many holes are there in a paper towel roll: 1 or 2? Of course, there is the joke that if you claim 1, then there is only one hole of consequence in the human body: that which leads from your mouth to the escape of your digestive system. At that point you’re just talking out of your ass. ...

I’ve been curious how cultural trends adjust our feelings toward various habits people have. The biggest change to me has been that of the hipster blogger, sitting in a coffee shop with their MacBook, doing some personal photo-journalism for the benefit of mankind. I think the common notion of what, and who, a writer is has changed dramatically. No longer is it necessarily someone cramped up in an attic, papers everywhere, a drink at hand; it can be anyone with just about any device. I’m sure there are people out there who write posts from their phone – I know I’ve at least edited a few posts from mine. ...

As I come to the realization that a significant part of both my work and personal hobbies involve sitting at a computer, I have become increasingly wary of the stories I hear about things such as repetitive stress injuries (RSI), and what will likely be the impending damage to my eyes. In an effort to avoid, or at least delay, the former issue I have tentatively purchased an ergonomic keyboard. Specifically, the Surface Ergonomic Keyboard from Microsoft. I say tentatively because it’s not cheap. I may return it, but so far I’ve put a few thousand keystrokes on it and it’s feeling pretty good. This review is meant to get as in-depth as a keyboard review can be when written by someone who has never written a keyboard review. I’ll briefly explain my rough, but sufficient, testing procedure and what I found out. Then I’ll get into some details and comparisons I noted to other keyboards I’ve used. ...

Wordpress (both the .org and .com versions) is rolling out a new native editor. It is a “block” system, and I am entirely unsure how I feel about it. I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and try to write a somewhat complete post using the Wordpress.org back-end, with this new block system, and see how it goes. ...

At this point in my life, I’ve driven from Minnesota to California twice, and done the reverse trip once. I’ve also road-tripped from Minnesota to Virginia, Kansas City (twice), and Nashville. I feel pretty confident that if I needed to, I could hop in a car and get where I needed without much effort or worry. It’s a mode of transportation I am extremely comfortable with on any scale, and am well-versed in some of its intricacies. ...

During sophomore year of college, I embarked on a project to put a Linux operating system on my laptop. I had been interested ever since using a computer in one of the engineering labs which ran Ubuntu, one of the most mainstream, user-friendly distributions out there. I was intrigued both by the visual design, and the ease with which complex programs could be run. There was also the intrigue of feeling like a cool hacker, using a terminal and typing commands to get around a file system. I was hooked, and since then I’ve had a Linux distribution running on every computer I’ve owned over the past three years. I want to spend a good chunk of time explaining my growing passion for Linux, and why I think more people should seriously consider it as an option for the computers in their lives. This first post will focus on two of the oft-repeated phrases in the Linux community, and its main inspiration: Linux is free. ...

Yesterday I switched over from using Wordpress.com to hosting my blog on Bluehost and using the official Wordpress blogging environment. The main difference here is when you are using Wordpress.com, there is some gray area about who really has control over the content. You are ultimately at the whims of their hosting structure, and also you must pay through the nose to access the various features of the actual Wordpress blogging platform it claims to deal with. ...

I recently discovered that Spongebob Squarepants is available on Amazon Prime Video. Since I am still a subscriber to said service, I enjoyed a fun weekend night watching the first couple of seasons. I’ve always had such positive nostalgia for the show, in large part due to how quotable it is. Little did I realize that nearly every line in the show is quotable, and how good each episode was in the early seasons. Even today, they have a certain innocent charm to them, yet the jokes still have enough depth to be legitimately funny now. ...

Now that I’ve gotten into my full-time job, and I’m familiar with the area, a certain novelty that comes with a new situation has worn off. I am not finding brand new things all the time anymore. I know where I’m getting my groceries from, I know what I’m having for lunch each day, and generally know what I’m having for dinner. To a certain extent, I have fallen into a fairly predictable schedule on a weekly basis. Thursdays I have concert band rehearsal. Sunday or Monday I record Comical Start with Grant, and edit it that night. At some point each week, I sit down and try to write a sufficient post for this blog. Every so often a surprise phone call, or an episode of OHAC comes up, which I get to work in with everything else. But overall, I’ve developed a schedule. ...