On Notebooks and Pens

Writing / 4 Comments

A few weeks ago, I came across a blog post about the author’s reasons for switching to a different everyday-carry notebook. I love posts like these, and this one had me clicking on websites, blog posts, and videos about notebooks and pens until long past bedtime.

For some, it can be difficult to resist the possibility that a new notebook or pen might help squeeze more insightful words onto a blank page. There’s a reason I highlighted this passage from Todd Henry’s Daily Creative:

Sometimes the feel of a new tool in your hands is all it takes to create a spark: a new keyboard for your computer, a new pen or notebook. There’s no magic in the tool; it’s how the new tool makes you feel about working, how it invites you back into your craft.

I love digital note-taking and spend a lot of time organizing and linking my reading and knowledge notes. But I sometimes question whether that investment will ever pay off.

…

On Notebooks and PensRead More »

Elevate Your Online Reading with Matter

Reading, Technology / 2 Comments

I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.

A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.

The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.

…

Elevate Your Online Reading with MatterRead More »

Why Blogs Matter

Technology, Writing / 14 Comments

This blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate.

I had no idea what I was doing when I shared that first essay in 2014. Since then, I’ve written about a hundred more posts. Each is now swirling around the ether, a faint signal in the noise for those who share an interest in keeping a journal, or reading great books, or managing finances on a Mac, or taking better notes. Or being a better father, or living aboard a boat, or suffering an unimaginable loss.

An odd assortment, I know.

Readers from sixty countries have visited my blog. I have corresponded with dozens of people with questions or comments about what I’ve written. I’ve also become friends with other bloggers who care deeply about many of the same things. It’s a marvel of the internet age that we have this medium to find each other, rare and valuable needles in an unending hayloft.

…

Why Blogs MatterRead More »

My Year of Reading in 2024

Reading / 13 Comments

I read 53 books last year, split about evenly between physical and e-books, and listened to just one audiobook. I usually listen to 10 -15 audiobooks a year, but in 2024, I decided to leave the AirPods behind on long walks to be more present. This felt like a fair exchange.

Favorites

The best non-fiction book I read last year was An Immense World by Ed Yong. The book shares how other animals sense the world in ways humans cannot. The book covers dozens of species, from an elephant’s incredible sense of smell to how spiders sense and surf on electric charges in the Earth’s atmosphere. You can’t read these amazing stories without shifting uncomfortably in your chair. We think we understand reality but are too limited by our senses. We are not seeing the whole picture. This is a mind-expanding book.

…

My Year of Reading in 2024Read More »

Celebrating Three Years of Sobriety

Personal Essay / 9 Comments

I passed my third anniversary of giving up alcohol today. I thought I would share some background on this milestone and why I decided to stop drinking.

I have a long history with alcohol.  Maybe it’s the genetics mapped deep in my Irish blood or an inheritance from longstanding tradition, but alcoholism runs in the family, near and far. I can’t think of a time in my life that wasn’t steeped in the rituals of drinking. 

I met the love of my life in a dive bar. Most of my proudest accomplishments and favorite moments were punctuated with a celebration beer or glass of wine. An early love of Hemingway surely contributed to an interweaving of my very identity with alcohol. If I closed my eyes and pictured my true self in my natural element, it was cozied up to a dimly lit bar with a whiskey on the rocks in a brown, brown study.

…

Celebrating Three Years of SobrietyRead More »

How A Hidden Feature in Bear Changed the Way I Review Notes

Technology, Writing / 7 Comments

This is the second of what might become a series of posts about how I use the Bear app to improve how I leverage notes in my reading and thinking. This is not a topic that will interest many, but writing a blog offers its indulgences. Unless your interests lie in the nerdier aspects of note-taking systems, you can safely skip this one.

If you told me a year ago that I’d write a blog post about the power of Apple widgets, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am—writing a blog post about Apple widgets.

You might be asking, what are you even talking about? What are widgets? Apple introduced these quirky appendages in 2020 as a way to present information from apps on the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The most popular widgets provide information about weather, stocks, and news. My reaction back then was decidedly ho-hum. Why would I want to clutter the precious real estate of my iPhone screen when I could just open the app?

A particular kind of widget in Bear 2 finally convinced me of their value.

In January, I switched from Craft to Bear 2 for my reading and knowledge notes. I shared why I chose Bear in this post. The switch went so well that I soon brought over my journal from Day One and my writing from Ulysses. For the past four months, almost everything I’ve written has started and ended in Bear.

…

How A Hidden Feature in Bear Changed the Way I Review NotesRead More »

The End of Private Libraries

Reading / 9 Comments

There seem to be two kinds of people on this earth—those who love books and everyone else. The bookish have always been far outnumbered, and the gap must be widening in this age of endless digital entertainment. I count myself among the proud minority, but a book, of all things, has brought into question my lifelong practice of keeping a private library.

A recent acquisition illustrates the issue.

“Didn’t you just read this on your Kindle,” Lisa asks me as she flips through the book I’ve brought home.

I dislike direct questioning about my book-buying habits. It feels like the pointed inquiries on medical questionnaires about alcohol consumption.

“Yeah, but I liked it so much I wanted the hard copy,” I tell her.

The fact is, I will likely never read this book, even though I did enjoy it. I bought the book because I like having a visual, tangible record of the time this book and I spent together. I like scanning my shelves and seeing proof of a rich reading life. I like the way a roomful of books makes me feel about myself. Besides, I tell myself, there are worse ways to spend money.

…

The End of Private LibrariesRead More »

Bear 2 for Writing and Thinking

Technology, Writing / 23 Comments

For the past six weeks, I’ve been evaluating an app to replace Craft for my reading notes.  This post shares the reasons I’m moving away from Craft and why Bear 2 might be the best app around for writing and thinking on the Mac and iPad.

Craft and the Value of Connected Notes

I use Craft to capture the notes, quotes, and wisdom I’ve gleaned from reading and studying.  Before Craft, these notes languished in the margins of books or notecards stuffed in a file box.  In three years with Craft, I have written almost four hundred reading notes linked to several hundred dedicated theme notes, creating what is unfortunately called in personal knowledge management circles a “second brain.” 

The lofty promises of automatic insights from smart note-taking tools are mostly overblown.  I still resort to notecards or a paper notebook when I’m forced to really concentrate. A digital tool does solve the issue of near-instant retrieval, though, and there is goodness in gathering notes together in a trusted system. 

…

Bear 2 for Writing and ThinkingRead More »

Reading The Story of Civilization

Reading, Trawler Life / 8 Comments

In the spring of last year, I started reading The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This is no quick undertaking. Spanning eleven volumes and 10,000 pages, it will take me the rest of this year to finish.

The first volume was published in 1935 when Durant had just turned 50. He published the final volume forty years later. Midway through these decades of writing, Will’s wife Ariel became a co-author and active collaborator in this epic undertaking. Together, they read an average of five hundred books as research for each published volume.

The Story of Civilization is regarded as one of the most compelling narratives of world history ever written. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Goodreads currently gives these books a 4.4 out of 5. Such a high rating is rare, which indicates how readers truly admire the series. Essayist Jamie Todd Rubin chose these as the sole books to take along to his proverbial desert island, which was all the prompting I needed to start this adventure.

…

Reading The Story of CivilizationRead More »

My Two Journals

Writing / 8 Comments

I surprised myself a little over a year ago by writing in a paper journal every morning. The surprise wasn’t that I was keeping a journal but that I was doing it by hand. I had been using the Day One journaling app to record my private thoughts for over a decade. But this was no ordinary year. After suffering an immeasurable loss, I yearned for the comfort that sometimes only flows from pen and paper.

Yet what’s even more surprising is that this was no momentary whim. I’ve kept up this daily habit of scribbling in a notebook in the morning and typing in Day One at night for over a year now. And I think I’ve pieced together why, for me, the combination of analog and digital writing has developed into the best possible journaling experience.

The Benefits of Journaling

Keeping a journal promotes mindfulness, reduces stress and anxiety, improves memory, and can enhance creativity. Journaling can also help you heal from profound loss, providing solace, catharsis, and a means to explore feelings that might otherwise get suppressed. When my son was killed in a motorcycle accident a little over a year ago, I turned to my journal as a way to process my grief.

…

My Two JournalsRead More »

Quicken Classic for Mac – A Long-time User Review

Money, Technology / 37 Comments

I’ve used some version of Quicken for 35 years. That puts me in a stodgy demographic that manages money in a certain “this is how I’ve always done it” way. For the uninitiated, Quicken is a personal finance software program that helps manage your checkbook and credit cards, pay your bills, keep to a budget, and track investments. It’s available on Windows and Mac, though there are differences in capabilities between the two. There are companion apps for iPhone and iPad, but they feel like afterthoughts, lacking key functionality of the desktop software. Quicken Classic is sold as an annual subscription across three offerings: Deluxe, Premier, and the recently released Business and Personal edition.

Seven years ago, I switched from Quicken Premier for Windows to the less capable Mac version. I’ve written previous blog posts about using Quicken on the Mac: in early 2018 when I switched and follow-on updates in 2019 and 2020. In large part, I was critical of the Mac version of the software, particularly its inability to export investment data.

In the intervening four years since my last post, Quicken has improved in many ways, including the ability to export all its data, including investments, to Quicken for Windows. With this critical functionality in place, I thought it was time to provide an updated and favorable review of the Mac version of Quicken and how I rely on it to manage almost every aspect of my financial life.

…

Quicken Classic for Mac – A Long-time User ReviewRead More »

My Year in Reading

Reading / 2 Comments

I read 75 books in 2023, my high water mark for the most reading in a year. Books have always been like a warm blanket, and I needed that comfort during a most challenging year.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. — James Baldwin

I took on some ambitious books during the year. I read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which has long been on my to-be-read pile. I read a new translation of The Odyssey after having last followed the plight of heroic Odysseus some thirty years ago. I am tackling a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s epic eleven-volume Story of Civilization. I inherited these books from my Grandmother twenty-five years ago, and I have finally found the time to read them. Discovering her careful handwriting in the margins of these books has revealed a new and somewhat startling side to my prim and proper Grandmother. What you mark and highlight says a lot about your thoughts and beliefs. It’s like a second history is being told in these pages. I’ve decided to leave my own trail of marginalia for my daughter, should she find the patience and fortitude to complete this generational journey herself one day.

A Slow Read of The Story of Civilization

 

…

My Year in ReadingRead More »

The Curiosity of Micro.blog

Technology, Writing / 3 Comments

How I fell into a trance with the Indy blog service, Micro.blog, is a curious story.

I received a renewal invoice from HostGator notifying me that the cost of my bi-annual web hosting service was going up 58%. Quick math informed me that I was paying too much for a personal blog. Surely there must be a less expensive alternative? That question led me down many paths, most leading me in circles.

Moving to WordPress.com seemed like a good idea until I realized its plug-in-enabled service made even HostGator’s renewal price seem like a steal. I considered Medium and Substack, but their continual pestering readers to subscribe to their respective services didn’t mesh with my belief in the value of an open internet. Many other competing web hosting services offered attractive short-term teaser rates but would require constant leapfrogging from service to service to remain affordable.

One service — Micro.blog — caught my attention briefly. $5 a month for hosting your blog with your own domain, a federated service that automated cross-posting to all sorts of other sites, and a blogging platform that allowed you to publish both long essays and short tweet-like updates to a timeline with no ads and no algorithms. No spam, no trolls. No fake news. Just old-fashioned blogging.

…

The Curiosity of Micro.blogRead More »

The Wastelands

Personal Essay / 5 Comments

Grieving the loss of a child is a journey through wastelands you never expected to cross. Unlike every other challenge you’ve ever faced, there is no easy way through a loss like this. You stumble and fall. You curse. You are hobbled and bloody. You are not sure of the way. You might be going in circles.

The truth is everyone suffers in this life. It’s our lot to take the awful with the beautiful. We all must face it. In a perfect world, your mom wouldn’t forget you in the fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. You wouldn’t lose a dear friend to cancer in the prime of her life. Your son wouldn’t die in a motorcycle accident before his twenty-first birthday.

In the months before we lost Connor, we crossed a high wire of reinvention. We retired from our careers. We sold our long-time family home and said goodbye to a lifetime of friends on Vashon Island. We bought a winter home in Arizona with the half-sane plan of living a life split between the summer sea and the winter desert. For half the year, home was where we’d drop the anchor.

Reinvention might come easier for some. I felt like a reluctant hermit crab who knows he must shift to a new shell to survive but dreads the transfer. The plans were years in the making. And just at that vulnerable juncture between one shell and the other, that final letting go of the safety and security of the familiar for the heady promise of a new life, a tsunami upends everything, stranding this naked, scared crab, its tiny claws raised as if to fight the wind and water and waves.

…

The WastelandsRead More »

A Father’s Grief

Family, Personal Essay / 17 Comments

This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. I’m sharing this partly because I hope that releasing these words will provide some catharsis from the excruciating pain I have carried around these last months. Perhaps the sentiments I’ve conveyed here can be a small comfort to someone who has experienced a similar tragedy. I also know that people are worried about us, about me. Consider this an abbreviated journal of our past one hundred days. Unlike anything else I’ve written, this one contains no epiphany, enlightenment, or happy ending. This one is mired in the messy middle of heartbreak and loss.

On the night of September 27th, our son Connor died in a motorcycle accident in Colorado Springs. A car pulled out in front of him on a busy street a half mile from his apartment. He was killed instantly in the crash. He was riding a motorcycle he had owned for just one day. He was twenty years old.

I mentally replay the call we received from the coroner’s office in the wee hours of September 28th over and over and over again, my mind trying to push this all away, to wake up from the darkest, longest nightmare of my life.

…

A Father’s GriefRead More »

Scroll to Top