Not long after the guns of the Civil War fell cold in the 1860s, John Muir opened a notebook and inscribed his name on the frontispiece. “John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe,” he wrote, situating himself as firmly as any of us may hope to do so. And then he started walking, a thousand miles or so,… Continue reading Muir’s Notebooks: Thinking and Working in the Age of Distraction
I have a little yellow Daisy on my front porch that I’ve been trying to keep alive for a few weeks. I’m not doing a very good job of it. The flower lives life on a strange carnival ride of forgetfulness, swinging wildly from healthy, golden vitality to a state of near-death droopiness over the… Continue reading The Daisy
“When we gazed upon all this splendour at once, we scarcely knew what to think, and we doubted whether all that we beheld was real.” Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Conquest of Mexico and New Spain You land on a strange “installation” and there are a few moments of silence for you to take in… Continue reading Video Game Spaces: Halo
Post number 1. Sounds like fun.
So, full disclosure: I've deleted my Facebook account twice in the past 6 years. Last month I came back again after about six months away with a shamefaced grin. It made me sad to think about all of the people I know sharing their lives with one another, without me. If I'm unwilling to let… Continue reading Problem 1,364,872 with Facebook and Data
Between cleanup from one hurricane, preparation for another later this week, dissertation research in history, coursework in Information Science, and a mini-vacation last weekend, I haven’t had much time to think about the mobile Zotero project. I still don’t have a name for the project, but I have at least started building a list of… Continue reading Mobile Zotero Part 2: Planning Features
As a scholar and open source devotee, Zotero is my life. (Click the link to learn about the best bibliographic management software in the world.) I use it as a personal library, a personal assistant. Sometimes it feels almost like a second brain: the brain where I’ve stored all of the connections between books and ideas… Continue reading Zotero Mobile
I am not a programmer. I wouldn’t even call myself a coder. But that doesn’t mean I can’t use code to make my life a little easier. Here’s a very simple Python script I wrote yesterday morning that saved me hours of work: What does it do, and how does it do it? Let’s start… Continue reading A Quick Paean to Code
