Category: blog

My fitness goal for this week was to get my steps in. So far I’ve beaten my 6,000 step goal each day. Last week, as I was getting into the swing of things, I relied on getting my walking in during a big burst of activity. It didn’t go so well. The daily step totals are looking good: Day Steps Monday 6,586 Tuesday 6,945 Wednesday 6,434 Now I’ve figured out how to spread my walking throughout the day.

I do all my writing in Ulysses. I also like to keep all of my files in its library. Since I started using it, the idea of having individual files scattered about my computer is just plain barbaric. The cost of this trade off is that if Ulysses doesn’t support a feature, I have to add raw HTML into the files. Normally this isn’t much of a problem. A bit HTML set off with ~~ isn’t distracting.

Sometimes I run across an older book that’s usually out-of-print, but has exceptional wisdom locked up in its pages. I found this one at my local Half Priced Books. First Edition cover, 1991. The very nature of this book—20 essays about writing by the best SFF authors—makes it hard to review as a whole. I think a better strategy is to look at each chapter in detail. See all of my WSF&F chapter reviews.

This is the first of my weekly fitness updates. I’ll be posting one every Monday for the foreseeable future. This week has been eye-opening. First, I’m finding out just how out-of-shape I am. Second, hitting a step goal is really hard if it happens in one big burst of activity. I update a shared iCloud spreadsheet every day. Follow along! Weight & BMI Apparently every little bit helps—I managed to lose 1.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals. The week was about increasing my activity levels.

Sometimes I run across an older book that’s usually out-of-print, but has exceptional wisdom locked up in its pages. I found this one at my local Half Priced Books. First Edition cover, 1991. The very nature of this book—20 essays about writing by the best SFF authors—makes it hard to review as a whole. I think a better strategy is to look at each chapter in detail. See all of my WSF&F chapter reviews.

Getting paid online is a delicate balance of convenience vs. cost. Some of the services are used simply because they’ve been around the longest. Like PayPal. But new ones seem to pop up every other day. For the most part, they’re worth signing up for to see how things work. The newest is Cash.me from Square. They have a nice link-shortening gimmick called “cashtags.” The idea is to create a username starting with a dollar sign ($) which then becomes your unique URL.

The NFL owners spent an hour talking about extra points today. The current rules make the PAT boring. Most of the time the TV broadcast doesn’t even show it. The discussion was just that, talk. But there are plans for the Competition Committee to come back with a proposal for a May vote. The general consensus seems to be the extra point should be made into a football play. This will be interesting on how it shakes out for the kickers.

Just to the shoot the elephant in the room: Yes, there is gadget lust involved here. Ever since the original announcement I’ve wondered exactly how I could justify the purchase of something so unnecessary. The features are well documented by Apple and others. I don’t see a need to rehash what a cottage industry of speculation has already hashed. So to my possible financial detriment, I went and looked at Apple’s Watch pages.

Sometimes I run across an older book that’s usually out-of-print, but has exceptional wisdom locked up in its pages. I found this one at my local Half Priced Books. First Edition cover, 1991. The very nature of this book—20 essays about writing by the best SFF authors—makes it hard to review as a whole. I think a better strategy is to look at each chapter in detail. See all of my WSF&F chapter reviews.