That’s how many pages I need to print from 24 years worth of writing on this website. Printing them from the library and over time may be my best bet I think. Let them worry about the paper and ink costs.
Tag: Journal
You can catch up on previous episodes on the Podcast page.
What am I doing? Why did I start an online course when my brain is already overwhelmed with these other self-inflicted endeavors?
Fortunately our brains have the ability to change, grow and reorganize its neuron pathways to make new connections and remap from how it previously functioned.
Does this explain why my head hurts right now?
Did I just enroll into a distance-learning course from Harvard at the last moment? Verification complete- the course starts today, September 5th.
Welcome!
Introduction to Digital Humanities will orient and train you in a wide variety of digital tools and techniques that allow humanists and social scientists to ask new research and teaching questions and make new claims using data.
The course will teach you:
- What the term “digital humanities” means in different disciplines.
- How common digital tools work and examples of projects using them.
- How various file types can be used to create, gather, and organize data.
- How to use command-line functions to analyze text.
- How to use free tools to create visual text analysis.
I did the same thing nine years ago when enrolling for courses at Stanford. What have I done? What I always do: I am doing it because it stimulates my brain and I enjoy it.
Once again, I find myself working behind the scenes of this website. This time, I am organizing the backend, the stuff that no one else sees. I am also wrapping up the migration of writings from my previous sites into here for posterity. Such as it is.
It’s been fun to look back and see the previous designs of this site in all of its iterations. I’ve learned a lot, experimented quite a bit, and still have a ways to go. Nowadays, I care more about substance than style and will make an effort to keep the experiments to a minimum. Until then, here are a few screenshots of this site through the years. I wish I could have done the same during the early years.
With the help of the Internet Archives and their Wayback Machine, I am slowly cutting/pasting/posting some of this website’s missing articles that somehow did not migrate and log.
The Machine only takes snapshots and not the full site, so I’m positive there are a lot of posts missing and maybe gone forever.
I was missing four years from 2013-2017 and I have regained a lot since my last post on this. I’ll finish porting over the rest tomorrow. For now, I am hopeful and in debt to the Internet Archive organization. Now my website’s Archive Page has listings for the previous twenty four consecutive years.
Thirty one days ago I decided to write a post to this website every day in August, hence- BLAugust. But didn’t you post only photos or quotes on some of those days, Chris? Yes, because this site has my name on it and I was busy re-decorating a master bedroom and bathroom.
Have you heard about the Internet Archive? I have but somehow always forget that it is available. It is a library of books, software, music, websites and more. A perfect blend of old and new knowledge. This is truly a national treasure.
Did I mention websites? It’s true- the WayBack Machine deploys spiders across the world wide web to take snapshots of websites. They send them out everywhere and my old websites were caught at least two times a month. This is how I discovered a problem with my own personal archives.
There are missing records.
I verified this when I searched the Archives Page on my own site. From September 2013 until November 2017, FOUR YEARS of my writing cannot be found.
I did a cursory search on one of my hard drives just for the year 2015 that turned up 37,000 results, none of them were my writings. I’ll need to check the rest but for now I am bummed. No idea what happened but hope I can find them, post them, back them up online and in print.
It has been a full month since I told my phone carrier I want to remove the data package from my mobile plan. The monthly bill for just talk and text is $20 monthly.
To prepare myself for this, I ripped a lot of music from compact discs, then realized Apple Music has download features so I did that to all of my playlists. Next, I downloaded an offline version of maps so I can still navigate around this new area. The same goes for other media such as podcasts and e-books.
Truth time- the first week offline I was reaching for the phone to look something up but was unable to. Time to panic? I did, but got over it quickly. I cannot send or receive photos via Messages app, again, just text.
Sure, I am not able to use the Geocaching app to discover hidden caches, but eventually I’ll get another hand held GPS unit for that. No e-mails either, but wait, is that so bad? It isn’t.
I may be “off”, but I am content for now.
I just wrapped up a sobering re-read of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. A cautionary tale of what happens when books are outlawed and burned upon discovery by firemen. This novel carried more weight for me today, then when I first read it back in junior high.
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door…Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
This completed book takes me to 18 out of my goal of 24 novels read in 2024. Only 6 more to go for the next four months. Hell, I’m sure I can beat 24 and go to 30 by then. But then my desire is more than a goal because there is too much out there I want to consume. None of these include all of reading I have done from the RSS feeds, Substack or magazines offered in the Apple News app!
On the last day of 2023, I mapped out which books I wanted to read this year and it fun to see how it is flexible. The titles changed based on whimsy, discovery, availability and finally, how one book’s theme can affect the next pick. Example- I’ve read mostly fiction this year but have a desire to switch to non-fiction for the next one.
My issue with non-fiction books are that the recent offerings are lacking. I don’t care to read someone’s opinion on a war, politics, historical biographies with “new” information to sway my bias. Self-help books are en vogue for a few months but cannot stand tall over time due to another new craze on the topic.
Under the Library page of this website is a list of the previous readings for the past few years. At the top it will say “Currently Reading.” This is blank for now, purposely.
