Category: FreeForm

  • A Big Question

    What question can sustain me, voracious as I am? (And, more to the point, hold my attention.) What problem is worthy of a lifetime of effort? (Many of them.) What sits at the intersection of those two sets?

  • It’s All Life

    You will be pleased to hear that I signed up for a writing challenge to lay out the Quest for 2016 over the course of the month of December. (I presume you will be pleased, since you are bothering to read. If you are not pleased, please pass by. We are a hedge.) It’s not…

  • I Don’t Pay for Coffee

    I Don’t Pay for Coffee

    Financial advisors hate lattes. Apparently we can stop all this absurd drinking of our foofy coffees, invest the money instead and at the end of our lives we’ll be gazillionaires with yachts. Yay, yachts, sometime way off in a nebulous future in which I want a yacht. Meanwhile, there is this, my standard order: The woman…

  • On Feeling OK

    Hey, guys. That woman up there… she knows how to write code. She also knows how to have hard conversations, comfort the hurt, love whole-heartedly, and solve astonishingly difficult physics equations. She has climbed mountains, floated a flower down the Ganges, ridden a mountain bike down a ski hill, and written words that made people cry.…

  • A Burger

    I might just be posting this to show you what happened when I took my teenager out for a hamburger the size of his head. He thought I was exaggerating.

  • Design Decisions

    (Cross-posted from figuresthingsout.com) “Circular buttons are very friendly and approachable.” – Meng To, DesignCode.io I’m reading along in the iOS Human Interface guidelines, and they’re talking about embracing “borderless buttons”, and I think, “How is that different from a link?” and then remember that I didn’t realize I could click on those things when I…

  • Spiritual Crosstraining

    Last week I had the great opportunity to go to Gampo Abbey to attend a teaching by Pema Chodron on the subject of “Living by Vow”. Pema (as we affectionately know her) is an American Buddhist nun in one of the Tibetan lineages. As such, she is carrying forward a long tradition, with forms most ornate.…

  • #MicroblogMondays Scurrying

    I’m having challenges keeping student-Seonaid, CEO/Founder-Seonaid, Mom-Seonaid, and Just-Plain-Seonaid all sort of going in the same direction. I’m pleased to report that there is a website for nerdique.com. It’s a pretty bare-bones WordPress site at the moment, but we’re in the middle of building a completely different back end. Node.js, and a whole bunch of…

  • Begin Again

    Yesterday I went skiing. The last time I went skiing I was in my early 20’s, and everything was different. My life, what I was going to be doing, who I was, my body. It was all different. Yesterday, I strapped on the skis, and presented myself at the foot of the bunny hill. Rode the…

  • Code is Easy. Money is Hard.

    Another autumn, another new blog. This time it was a requirement for a school program. So far, it has been focused on the problems of learning a new programming environment, language, blogging platform, and how all the pieces fit together from a technical perspective. But that is not the point of the program, and I…

  • Squirrels, Time and Is-ness

    “Has it really been that long?” I ask, looking at the date on my last post. The evidence is categorical. The date on my last post is July 7. And life has continued on apace. “They” are clear. If you want to build your blog, you must post regularly. At least once a week. Daily…

  • State of the Garden

    It is (finally) spring/summer in Cape Breton. Which means adding trees to replace the ones that froze to death: (That doesn’t usually happen.) Prepping the lawn mower: And getting ready for the prom: I know, that’s not strictly gardening… but look what I grew!