Category Archives: Life

One-and-a-Half Decades

On this day fifteen years ago, in 2011, I started this blog and published the first Logos con Carne post. Since then, I’ve published 2,118,480 words comprising 1,503 posts (plus 42 pages) — an average of 1,375 words per post.

The anniversary means it’s time for the biannual extract and analysis of the blog’s content and page views. It’s time for lists and charts and stats (oh, my). And a bottle of champagne tonight.

These posts tend to be a bit dry and uninteresting to anyone but me, so, dear reader, you’ll be forgiven for skipping this one.

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New and Old Stuff

In the last two Friday Notes posts [one and two] I mentioned spending March and April in getting stuff done mode (a change from my lazy retirement) but, other than a picture of my new couch, haven’t written much about it.

In part because I keep boundaries between online and Real Life™; in part because much of it is trivial (except to me); and in part because I didn’t have room in those Notes posts. (I am a man of many parts.)

However, one new thing is the opposite of trivial.

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And so, it’s back!

Winter, that is.

Except for some small piles in shaded areas, the snow was gone.

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Streets of Minneapolis

Bruce Springsteen just released a new single about events in Minneapolis:

Here are the lyrics:

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2026: Happy New Year!

And now we find ourselves in 2026. It’s a bit surreal on several counts, but I hope you all have been enjoying your:

Remember, the Twelve Days of Christmas go from December 25 to January 5, so take this winter solstice time to chill and relax — Chillaxmas.

Stay chill, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.


Wednesday Wow! (Dec 31, 2025)

I started Wednesday Wow posts back in 2012. Three posts in one month (Sept 12, Sept 19, and Sept 26). Then nothing for two years. More like nothing for six years as there was only one post in that time (a tribute to John Venn and his famous diagrams).

The 2018 Kīlauea volcano eruption on Hawai’i really wowed me. Since then, a trickle of Wow! posts — 32 in 14 years. The number of years invested in this blog is becoming its own small wow (a topic for next month’s annual roundup).

The Wow! today is making it to 2026. And to 70+ revolutions around the local star — the party for that was beyond awesome.

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Winter Solstice 2025

My most important annual event, the Winter Solstice, has passed (at 15:03 UTC; 9:03 AM CST) and the light shall return!

It’ll take a while to notice but get ready to party!

Stay warm, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.


And so, it’s here!

Winter (again), and in a pretty big way. As in shovel, shovel, shovel, brrrr

It seems pretty clear at this point we’ll have snow for Christmas.

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November Coding Binge

A few posts ago I wrote that for “two weeks I’ve indulged in intense 12+ hour days on a self-education project in Python and its Tk module.” The end result of the binge is seven new apps (so far; more to come) and a good starting grasp of how to make some fairly decent windowing apps in Microsoft Windows using out-of-the-box Python.

More concretely, my “tk” project folder has 14 Python files with over 9,000 lines of code (367,000+ characters). That’s what remains. I didn’t save the many false starts, tests, and trials. Suffice to say I probably wrote close to twice as much code.

This post is “Dear Diary” entry for documenting the progress, the fun, and the frustration. It may not be terribly interesting for anyone else, but I learned a lot and (ultimately) really enjoyed the experience. And it’s nice to find out that this ancient dog can still learn new tricks.

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And so, it begins…

Winter, that is.

Last evening, we had rain that turned to snow after midnight. The result, of course, it a bit of an icy mess.

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