And this is a pretty good summary of why I do not read and cannot stand most literary fiction – not because it is over my head (whatever that means), but because, well, it is so limited by its attempt to be unreadable to the hoi polloi.

LitFic is a genre just like any other, with its own conventions and limitations. I believe it is actually more limited because it is restrained – unlike many other genres – from using the implausible and fantastic to throw a revealing spotlight on the quotidian and the commonplace.

This is some really good writing about one of my favorite shows of all time that hardly anyone watched – that being Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

This group of characters, who are not on Team Connor, add so many layers of depth and complexity to the show, and elevate it from a pretty good show about soldiers and family preparing for a future robot apocalypse, to a truly compelling, complex, graceful piece of television that deals with war, loss, robots, the preservation of what makes us human, and how who and what gets written in the book of myth is only a fraction of the story.

That show went from ok at first to good, then to great, and then to absolutely amazing. Two episodes of that show are my two favorite episodes of any TV show of all time. Others are not even really close.

Lena Headey was so very good in the show. So was Summer Glau. And unlike basically every other show ever, it didn’t treat the female characters as some bizarre species that vaguely had something do with the story and could be killed off at need for dramatic effect, but instead they were absolutely essential parts without which that world (like the real world) would not turn.

When that show was cancelled, it was a very sad day.

I am sure (because I have read some of them!) that such things were written about those newfangled “printed” books back in the early 1500s.

But after close to half a decade of downloading and consuming any number of novels, autobiographies, comics and self-help titles in Kindle form, I have yet to feel as fully invested in the pixels on a Bezos-imagined screen as I do in the indelible glyphs found on good old-fashioned book paper.

Translation: I am old and do not like change.

I prefer ebooks in nearly every way to physical volumes. They are so much lighter. The fonts are better. They can be transferred easily to another device.

The reading experience is in every way simply superior. And not having to carry around heavy objects is always a plus.

Our house is filling with various gadgets, tools and items for the road trip. It will have to be organized and consolidated to fit into a single vehicle, but right now it’s just strewn everywhere.

A good sight, though. A new phase of life and the sort of thing most people wish they could do but do little to make it happen.

Why do people have such a problem believing that luck is a key part of their success? I am fairly successful and I know that luck is responsible for nearly all of my success: luck being born white in a society where whiteness is often seen as automatically better; luck in choosing to go into IT rather than journalism; luck in having enough money to do also-lucky things in the stock market at the right time; luck in being born able-bodied and with the right mind to deal with my rather neglectful upbringing.

There is so much more that could be added. Most of what allowed me to be where I am is nothing more than a roll of the dice, especially if you view it from the philosophical perspective of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.

Do I think I deserve the things I have? “Deserve” is the wrong word. It’s a reactionary word. I think everyone deserves every chance at a happy and fulfilling life, not some sparse 1% at the top hoarding all resources relentlessly while the rest are immiserated.

Getting there is the problem.

Why would you ever implement a feature like this?

The few hours I suffered through using Office 2013, I wondered why my typing was sometimes 2-3 words ahead of what appeared on screen. Now I know.

What a bunch of complete morons must have designed this. It made me feel like my computer was from 1993, when computers were so much slower that typing could not keep up.

Again, why, why would you ever do that? What the hell is with all the user-hostile design lately?

I’ve used NoMachine for many years to control Linux servers with a GUI. I can’t complain really because it was free, but I will anyway.

They’ve since upgraded to version 4 and holy hell, is it terrible. You have to resort to hacking around to config files to get it to behave correctly as it did before.

Before, it was one click – you clicked a button and it just worked. You were in the target remote machine. Now it’s been turned into some sort of shitty collaboration tool that requires multiple clicks to access the server, doesn’t just spawn a virtual desktop as it should, and is also much slower. And the GUI to set things up is terrible. No use of OS conventions, no discoverability. It should be shown in design schools for “what never, ever to do” day.

NoMachine 3.5 was absolutely perfect for what it provided. Version 4 is optimized for something most of its former users never used it for and is incredibly painful to use.

Will be looking for replacements after the road trip.

I’ve used a lot of laptops in my life. Personally, I’ve owned a half dozen and at the companies I’ve worked at I’ve supported dozens if not hundreds of different models.

Most of them are terrible – they feel shoddy, have bad screens and often just don’t work correctly.

The MacBook Pro is in a whole different class. It feels like alien technology someone stole and brought to earth. Everything on it just works correctly. It is perfectly balanced, cleverly designed and just feels solid enough to stop bullets (I don’t recommend trying that out).

Being a retina model, it also has a beautiful screen that is the best I’ve ever used on any laptop by a very far margin.

Along with my 100mm macro lens, one of the best things I have ever bought.

Anyone who tells you that a $500 Best Buy special is just as good as this piece of embodied elegance is absolutely full of shit.

Please Respect The "Back" Button.

I generally never return to sites that break back button functionality.

People are always looking for miracles and “secrets” to improve their health. Well, there aren’t any. But as near as I can tell here’s the things you can do that will meaningfully improve your health more than just statistical variation:

1) If you can help it, don’t be fat (and don’t let your weight oscillate in the attempt to not be fat).

2) Lift weights, heavy ones, at least 3x a week. This shows large improvement in health outcomes even for people who start in their eighties.

3) Don’t sit down a lot. Most office workers can’t avoid this easily, but sitting seems terrible for health.

Those three things will get you 80% of the way to living as long as your genes will naturally allow you to. The rest is just wasting time (yep, including healthy eating).

Love everything about her voice.

I don’t understand why Silicon Valley types don’t actually try to work for a better world when they have the means and the supposed professed interest to do so.

We’ve drowned in TED talks – like watching somebody masturbate on stage, only less pleasant and without the satisfaction of a definitive ending – by Valley guys who believe that because they have made a billion dollars by engineering better ways to harvest personal data online or make Mashable sidebar ads more clickable they are qualified to solve all of the world’s problems. While hunger and economic inequality have yet to be tamed, oddly enough The Valley has been remarkably successful of solving all of the problems inherent to being a twentysomething Valley Guy with tons of disposable income.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

“Most quotations you see on the internet are absolute horseshit that no one has researched and are usually not even vaguely correct.”

-Aristotle

Despite whatever flaws it might have (which every work does), Gravity is the only film I recall that has sustained tension throughout the entire work without essentially “tricking” the viewer.

It was, in the best of ways, a 90-minute film that felt like a four-hour movie. Catching Fire by comparison – though also a great movie – was well over two hours but felt far shorter than Gravity.

Walking out of the theater after Gravity, you feel sort of lost and disoriented. You realize, I just watched something people will be watching in 50 years.

As good as it was, I don’t think that is true at all of Catching Fire. It is very much of its time and that is fine. Not all works need to stand the test of the ages.

I honestly did not think Sandra Bullock had a performance like that in her. She fucking rocked it, though. I can’t imagine how much work that film must have been, acting alone on a KC-135 doing 8-12 hours a day of arcing across the sky for that necessary 90 seconds of weightlessness.

When I walked out of Gravity, I could not believe that only 90 minutes had passed. I think I looked at the time 3-4 times in the car.

I resigned from my job a few minutes ago. I’ve worked at the same place for nearly five years, which is a long time for me. I get professionally bored easily and am lucky to have the privilege of leaving jobs that I don’t like or am not moving forward in whenever I wish to.

However in this case that’s not why I decided to leave.

Rather, it’s the covert and super-secret “project” I’ve been alluding to on here for months that has caused my departure.

This project is an extended road trip that will allow us to take in the US and Canada and eventually other parts of the world at our own pace, and in our own way, with no encumbrances of schedules and external demands.

We are suffice it to say very excited!

We leave February 7. And we cannot frickin’ wait.