The room mate from hell

Hospitals are not my favorite places at the best of times. They are such concentrations of pain, stress and raw emotion that I barely need twenty minutes before I start feeling emotionally overloaded in them. But, after last week, I have reason to like them even less.
Thanks to the overcrowding that has become the norm, [...]

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The well-bred boredom of celebrity blogging

Something has always bothered me about so-called celebrity bloggers, but I’ve never been quite able to identify it. I’ve vaguely thought that a lot of fuss was being made over very little, but never troubled to clarify the impression. The other day, though, I made a mental connection that explained why I was unimpressed.
When [...]

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The pleasures of re-reading

Ever since I learned to read, I’ve been a chain reader, sometimes literally finishing one book and picking up another one. Books have been my refuge from the bleakness and bad news of the day, a way to while away time while in line at the store, and my companion on constant rides on transit [...]

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My personal mythology

“Let us know compare mythologies”
-Leonard Cohen
One advantage of blogging, I find, is that it reveals my personal mythology. A single entry might not do so, but if I look over a few dozen entries (something I rarely do, because the urge to edit and improve is almost irresistible), a definite pattern starts to emerge.
When I [...]

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Learning to enjoy my daily swim

Today, I suddenly realized that I was enjoying swimming – enjoying it immensely. The reaction comes as a surprise for several reasons.
To start with, I learned to swim under what I remember as the most miserable conditions when I was a child. In my mind, all the swimming lessons I took in the local [...]

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Life on the fringes of academia

At the start or end of my morning run, I often meet one of my neighbors running for the bus. He works as an on-call English instructor at various institutions around the city, and often gets the call to teach at the last moment in the morning. He doesn’t seem to mind, except for the [...]

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Why I mistrust Myers-Briggs testing

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, in all its official and unofficial forms, is one of the most popular personality tests in the world today. It is widely used in by human resource managers, student counselors, and by just about any other kind of person who needs to assess others. Indirectly, it frequently determines whether people are [...]

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My current thinking about free software journalism

In the last few days, I’ve had several experiences that make me think about my role as a journalist in the free and open source software community:
The first was a reaction I had from someone I requested some answers from. Although I thought I was being polite, what I got back was an attack: “I [...]

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Weird T-shirts

I won’t wear a T-shirt that advertises a product or a company. The way I figure, if I’m going to be a walking billboard, you’re going to have to pay me – assuming you can coax me into doing it at all. The closest I come are T-shirts advertising a cause I support, such as [...]

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I ascend to the imperial purple

I’ve always jumped around from job to job, but this time I’ve topped myself. I’ve taken the job of Galactic Emperor, six millenniums from now.

Or, to be exact, I’m playing the role of the Emperor Simonides in the Imperial Realms game for which I did some writing last year. Steve Bougerolle, whose project it is, [...]

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