Support your local public library

I remember when I was a kid, Tuesday was my favorite day of the week. That was because that was library day. One of my parents would take me and my siblings to the local public library where we would check out books and magazines, take them home to read, and bring them back next …

“Your opinion matters…” Helping people by sharing your experiences

My wife and I have an anniversary coming up, so I started planning a getaway trip to celebrate. (Because of the pandemic, we decided to keep the trip short -- only one night, and we're not venturing very far -- only about an hour's drive from our home.) While I was making my travel plans, …

References and memorization

I was working on a document, and wanted to toggle the language on MS Word that was used for proofing (I downloaded the template from our UK subsidiary, so it was proofing in UK, not US, English). I couldn't remember how to do it, so I consulted Google, found my answer, changed the setting, and …

Major League Baseball in Troy, NY

A friend of mine pointed out that a Wikipedia article about the Troy Trojans baseball team cited me as a reference! The article was actually a project for a Writing for Publication class that I took in grad school. It was later republished as a feature article in a baseball preview issue published by The …

Don’t like reading terms and conditions? It’s not just you

During my lunch break, I came across this article in the New York Times. It talks about privacy policies for a number of companies -- and the vast majority of them are nearly incomprehensible. According to the metrics in the article, comprehending privacy policies requires a minimum of a college degree -- and even then, …

The evolution of statistics

During my lunch break, I was perusing the ESPN website and stumbled across this article. It contemplates whether or not a .300 hitter (in baseball, for those of you who are sports-challenged) is meaningful anymore. As a baseball fan, the article caught my attention. I didn't read through the entire article (it ended up being …

My favorite PowerShell references

One thing I've been doing to improve my skill set is teach myself PowerShell.  For those of you who don't know what that is, here's my description in a nutshell: it's the command prompt on steroids. So far, I've come across some references, some good, some not so good, to guide me in this endeavor.  …