I have had this self-congratulatory fact in the Ideapad sidebar for some time now. On November 1, 1998, I started the Ideapad. So this marks a full quarter-century of posting my thoughts online.
When I began blogging, the community was small enough that Brigitte Eaton was able to hand-compile a list of all of them. I remember there being 500 or so when I first came across it; the farthest we can see in the Wayback machine shows 1285 weblogs, including this one. The web has come a long, long way since then, and while innumerable blogs have come and gone, the Ideapad endures.
When I reflect on what twenty-five years of blogging means, mostly it’s the persistence: my blog is still here, still publishing new content, at the same URL as when it was launched, and with almost all of the archives intact and readable. It’s not hard to do, but few do it, and when I’m blogging I’m continuing my commitment to digital longevity.
I revisited the bookmarks file referenced in 2018 to see who is still blogging, and oh, the linkrot. Let’s pause to appreciate those who keep at it. Jason Kottke, who inspired me to put up my own weblog, blogs for a living, of course. Peter Merholz, coiner of “blog,” is, blessedly, still maintaining his. Journal-bloggers like Jessamyn and Cat are still journaling away. A tip of the cap also goes to those who stopped blogging but keep their sites live, so their contributions to the formative era of the internet aren’t forgotten. I hope some of these folks see this, and I hope they realize the value of their efforts.
And to you, dear reader: I’ve long stopped looking at my site metrics, and for all I know, my only regulars are me and my mom. (Hi, Mom.) But I’m glad you stopped by, even this once, and I hope you enjoy exploring everything I’ve shared with the world these past 25 years.
My last-out-the-door iPhone 13 mini arrives today.
I’ve been using an iPhone 12 mini since spring 2021. With the exception of battery life it’s been great. For me, the most important thing is that the size is reasonable: I want to be able to hold it in one hand; I want to throw it in my jeans pocket without protrusion. Modern iPhones don’t meet those criteria.
I have been advocating for reasonable phone form factors for quite some time. Back in 2016 I skipped technology upgrade cycles and bought older hardware in order to own a right-sized iPhone SE that fit in my hand.
My hands aren’t getting any larger, but the iPhone is. So I made it a point to buy the 13 mini the day before this year’s September iPhone keynote. I was actually holding out hope that we’d get a surprise small phone and I could cancel the order, but the opposite occurred. Apple discontinued the mini the next morning.
There’s an interesting case study to be made on smartphone usability optimization, and how “I want a big screen” consistently trumps “I want it to fit in one hand.” I’m not alone in my desires, but I’m certainly in a minority segment.
Here’s to hoping my new phone lasts until Apple tries a return to smaller form factors.
Last week [sic], my boss scoffed at my iPhone SE and told me to get a bigger phone, so I picked up an iPhone 7 Plus just for work. Its 5.5″ screen creates a different productivity profile than my SE, and I’m excited to see how it plays out, as I’m now carrying both devices around the office. (The SE is still my main device, and retains my phone number and core suite of apps.)
But I also maxed out my 7 Plus with a 256 GB hard drive, and I’m testing whether I can finally bid a fond, loving farewell to my old iPod Classic.
While I enjoy streaming music services, I love having all my music ready for travel, impervious to drops in network connectivity. For years, the iPod Classic, with its hearty 160 gigabyte hard drive, has been my go-to device for the car, train, plane and hotel room, and allows me to drag around nearly 20,000 songs wherever I go. While the screen and clickwheel are in good shape, the battery is starting to give out, sacrificing some of its portability.
More importantly, I have a lengthy car commute these days, and my car’s touchscreen head unit does a terrible job navigating a music library of this size. I bought a bluetooth dongle instead, which has worked well, but now I’m constantly reconnecting and managing the battery life of two gadgets, three if you include my phone.
The 7 Plus should solve much of this. Its bluetooth will connect seamlessly in the car, as my SE already does; I’ll be able to use Siri, keeping my hands and eyes focused on driving; and the big hard drive ensures I have lots of runway to add more music. (I’d been considering an iPod Touch, but they never got past 128 GB, and I couldn’t bring myself to downsize.)
I’ve been joking about the goofy system profile of my new gadget all week: half a dozen work apps and eighteen thousand MP3s. I think I have a win-win on my hands, though. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
Drafted 2017/02/16 at 1:22 am. Published unedited. I still have the iPhone 7 Plus, and it’s still my main music hard drive, keeping up with my Apple Music library adds.
I am a voracious reader and always have been. As a kid, I read the Star-Ledger sports section every morning at breakfast; as a young adult, I read magazines while brushing my teeth; nowadays, it goes without saying that I’m constantly on my laptop and phone, reading.
My reading sources run the gamut, from newspapers to magazines to websites to RSS feeds of dozens of blogs to Twitter and its successors to fantasy baseball experts. The best writing leaves me both informed and entertained. I gravitate toward news and well-thought-out opinion pieces. I will read and devour most anything discussing rock music, New York City, pro sports, new cars, the entertainment industry, Apple, business strategy and current events.
What I haven’t read, in many years, is a novel. Or pretty much anything in book form.
It’s not for lack of trying. I bought The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and carried it on so many vacations across several years that it became a point of amusement for my children. (I think I’m on page 87.) Two years ago, I decided that the issue was the fiction angle, so I bought The Power Broker, and I’ve only managed the first 27 pages of that, which has made the travel bag a lot heavier with the same result.
I bought Moneyball, but never cracked it; my son has it right now. I thought about re-reading the classics, but I never get started. At one point my sister-in-law bought me a thoughtful Adam Gopnik compendium, and I thanked her, and never opened it. “But you’d absolutely love it!” she said, when it slipped out that I wasn’t reading it, which was probably true, but it was a book. “If you had given him the link to it in blog form,” my wife said, both needling and truthful, “he’d have read the whole thing.”
This summer, in my building’s community bookcase, someone left two Carl Hiaasen novels. I brought them upstairs and wound up taking the first one (Bad Monkey) on vacation last month, where it came to the beach a couple of times, instead of the usual Sunday New York Times Magazine. And that did the trick. I read maybe 75 pages on vacation, and the book was fun enough for me to keep going when I got home, and before I knew it I’d finished the book and whipped through its sequel, too.
Fiction! I’d finally gotten back into reading something that wasn’t designed to advance an angle or teach me something. Hiaasen is fairly light reading, but he’s good at telling a story, and the books kept me going. And, happily, reading the books didn’t detract from my other reading; it pulled me away from sitcom reruns and video games, making for a much more rewarding diversion.
The two Hiaasen novels are headed back to the basement for another neighbor to enjoy, and next up is my first book on Kindle, an Amor Towles novel that my wife says is fascinating. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Seriously: I love license plates. I think they’re endlessly interesting and amusing. Growing up, I played the license plate game for years on family vacations, looking for every U.S. state (Montana was my last). I got to know styles, variants, and updates for all of America, and the plates for eastern Canada, too. Growing up, I hated my local plates, so I tried to design my own (more on that later). I read—past and present tense—license plates as I go by, looking for catchy phrases and humor; I know by alphanumeric sequence which plates in my home state are the newest; I bristle at the new trend of defacing a plate to avoid tickets and tolls—in part on ethical grounds, and in part because it takes away some of my fun.
For better or worse, I have passed on this fixation to my younger son, who constantly tells me about what he sees, although he’s more about the logical order and less about finding words where there aren’t any. We do both enjoy a well done custom plate.
Anyway, Garrity’s post was about the recent history of PEI’s license plates, so let me discuss my own. I grew up in New Jersey, and when I was a little kid, they all looked like this:
New Jersey license plate, 1970s.
They weren’t much to look at, but they get high functional marks, with their high contrast making them easy to read. (I recall at one point learning about how plates’ readability correlates to cops’ ability to recover stolen cars.)
Soon after I started paying attenion, the Jersey plates got redesigned. The state added a New Jersey silhouette to the profile, replacing the center dot, but they inverted the color scheme, and came up with this cringe-worthy style:
New Jersey license plate, 1980s.
Apparently “blue and buff” is a thing to New Jersey, but it makes for an awful license plate. Readability certainly took a hit with this style. And the overall effect was just unattractive.
I had an Apple //c computer growing up, and around 1987 I went so far as to redesign the New Jersey license plate in Dazzle Draw. (Why I didn’t draw it freehand, I do not know.) I played up the Garden State angle, with a Jersey Tomato, and leveraged the Jersey Devil and the new hockey team’s color scheme, making a design with a white background and green-and-red visual elements. I sent two variations with a note to Governor Tom Kean’s office. I’m sure it looked pixelated and awful, but I bet it wasn’t any worse than the blue and buff license plate. The governor’s office did not respond.
By 1993, I had gotten a new car, and New Jersey had updated its license plates again, so mine looked like this:
New Jersey license plate, 1990s.
Readability was back, and the design was both retro and modern with its color fade, but what was this design? We’re giving up on “buff and blue”? The nice state stamp in between the letters stuck around, but in an era when other states’ license plates were increasingly attractive and clever, Jersey got a plate that met outsiders’ low expectations. With minor tweaks, this design persists to present day, thirty years of uninspired license plates on the Garden State Parkway.
Meanwhile, New York was pulling ahead. My childhood memories of New York plates were of the color and then the Statue of Liberty, which were fine—not exciting, but somehow more stately, interesting and important than New Jersey. Like the state and its namesake city, New York’s license plates (like California’s) had some presence, and it suited them.
In 2001, New York redesigned its license plates to showcase more of the state, and they nailed it.
New York license plate, 2000s.
This plate brought lots of good elements together: the state outline divider, the slogan, and a collage of statewide geographic features across the top, from Niagara Falls to the Adirondacks to the Manhattan skyline. It was handsome, easy to read, interesting and memorable. A great license plate.
My car at the time was registered in New Jersey, so I missed having that license plate on my vehicle. By the time I got a new car, in 2015, New York had moved back to the orange-and-navy theme of the 1970s, ditching the geographic elements, which were beginning to seem fussy, in favor of a simple, clean layout.
New York license plate, 2010s.
This design was… fine. Easy to read, plays off the past, curved lines and fonts give it some style, the shade of orange matched the NYC taxicab fleet pretty well. I didn’t love it, but there was nothing to dislike, either.
The same cannot be said of the current New York plates, which adorn my car now. They are emblematic of much of the Andrew Cuomo administration: well-intentioned, earnest, but failing to stick the landing.
New York license plate 2020s.
We are back to the previous geographic elements—all of them! Plus the Statue of Liberty returns, and now there’s a lighthouse, and some clouds. “Empire State” has been sacrificed for EXCELSIOR, which Cuomo loved to use, presented in an overly bold and blocky font, while the stripes atop the plate fall at an odd height and fail to tie the design together. The overall effect is amateurish. Kind of like something a middle school student would design at home, only this time it’s on every new license plate in the state.
Governor Kathy Hochul hasn’t expressed much concern over the current New York license plate, which is just three years old, but perhaps her successor will. Maybe we’ll get something inspired for the next decade. At least the current plates are easy to read. Excelsior.
A number of years ago, I made a conscious decision, based around privacy concerns and ad trackers, to minimize my time spent on Facebook and Instagram. It wasn’t especially hard; I deleted the Facebook app on my phone and diverted my attention elsewhere, and that was that. A little bit of righteous indignation goes a long way.
I have largely stuck to my decision and I’m no worse off for it. I’m not a Meta heathen; my accounts are active, and every now and again (a couple of times a month, I’d guess) I look through my feeds. I occasionally post to one or the other, when the moment is right. (And I use WhatsApp, because every group chat that’s not immediate friends now defaults to WhatsApp.)
Mostly, though, I’ve chosen to keep current on the news and chatter of the day, rather than the personal posts of social media. And for a long time, getting the best information of the moment meant hanging out on Twitter.
For the past nine months or so, the once-vibrant Twitter community has watched with concern as its new owner has put the service on a path of self-destruction. Competitors are now rushing to take its place, from grassroots distributed platforms to scrappy startups to, now, Instagram, in the form of Threads. Like many others, I have accounts on all of them.
Perhaps in a few months or years one of these systems will be our collective hangout like Twitter used to be. In the interim, though, it’s all rather overwhelming. I find myself completely at a loss as to which short-form posting platform to open. I’ve been flipping indiscriminately around all day without rhyme or reason. And still in muscle memory is that Twitter search is best for in-the-moment breaking news, so I’m still there, too, quieter but not gone.
What to do? We have so many decision points now. For one, where are my friends? My business colleagues? The interesting journalists and pundits I follow? The push news from the sources I trust? The fantasy baseball content? Darth?
Then: who do I want monetizing my feed? Elon Musk, on a site where he’s pushing extremist views? Or Mark Zuckerberg, whose platforms I so deliberately left not long ago? Or Jack Dorsey, whom most people blame for this situation existing at all? Or no one at all, via Mastodon, but leaving so much behind?
Or maybe—just maybe—I should just let go?
It may be time, at least for me, to stop chasing the conversation. It’s not really a conversation, anyway, not most of the time; you post, I post, they post, once in awhile someone replies, and once in a great while an actual conversation ensues. We’re all so used to this cadence that we don’t realize we don’t need it. But I know I don’t: my time away from FB/IG proves it. I just need to extend that motivation.
Giving up a 15 year short form posting habit would not be easy. I enjoy having an outlet for sharing thoughts in writing (see also) and with social media there’s a built-in audience. But then, audiences are elusive; sometimes my posts get some attention, and oh the dopamine hit that comes from a retweet, but sometimes I float a thought at the wrong time of day, or that the algorithm doesn’t dig, and fewer than 20 people even see it. With the fragmentation of the landscape, it’s all a crapshoot now.
I’ve been carrying around an old copy of “The Power Broker” for a good while. This could be a great time to commit myself to it. And a hundred other things that don’t require a social media feed.
In chronological order, with honorable mentions for the same platform noted in parentheses.
Combat for Atari 2600 (plus Breakout, football)
Friendlyware for MS-DOS
Pinball Construction Set for Apple ][
Pole Position arcade console (plus Offroad)
Marble Madness arcade console
Bard’s Tale III: The Thief of Fate for Apple ][
SimCity for Apple ][
Nintendo Golf for GameBoy
Klondike Solitaire for Mac OS 7
Triple Yahtzee for Mac OS 7
Risk for Mac OS 7
PGA Golf III for Sega Genesis
Mario Kart 64
Snake for Nokia mobile phones
Mario Kart Wii
Sparkle for iOS
Wii Sports and Wii Sports U (particularly golf and disc golf)
Klondike Solitaire for iOS (Mobilityware version)
Taberinos for Flash
Bounzy! for iOS (plus Holedown, Physics Balls)
Townscaper for iOS
What I find most interesting about this list is how many of these games I still play and can play, even though the top game on this list dates to 1980. The bottom four are all in regular rotation—I play Taberinos in a legacy desktop Flash player—and many of the others I’ve played in the past couple of years, thanks to still-working consoles and MacMAME. Last spring I played Wii Sports disc golf as a nightcap for almost two months straight.
Also, I need some new games.
Drafted 2023/01/02 at 1:08 pm. Published with clarifying edits and epilogue.
I last bought a new car back in March 2002, when this website was hand-coded with a sidebar. That car was a share, with my brother; for good measure, we even titled and registered it in my mother’s name.
As one might imagine, this became increasingly anachronistic as we married, had children, went gray, etc. The ridiculousness of being in my 40s and driving what amounted to Mom’s extra car has not been lost on me. That said, it’s been wonderful: our car lasted a long time, and my brother and I had a remarkably easy time swapping it back and forth all these years. I move on with no complaints.
But move on I must, away from the car that requires a steering fluid refill every few weeks, that shakes like a Magic Fingers motel bed at red lights, that occasionally requires I slam my fist into the passenger door armrest to reconnect the stereo speaker. Owning a car means never knowing exactly when to say goodbye. But then, as a friend remarked to me, there’s a direct correlation between hanging onto our car and the odds of waiting on the side of the highway for the AAA guy.
Buying a car is a full-on ordeal. I performed far too much research, considered dozens of cars, visited no fewer than eight dealerships, drove seven different vehicles. I emailed or called even more dealerships than that, in a quest to find the exact car I was after, some more than 300 miles away.
The salespeople at the dealers were mostly miserable. I received price quotes in a $7,000 range, low to high, for more or less the same vehicle in each location. I had dealers say they had cars they didn’t. I had sales guys refuse to price match. I had a salesman bring me into the showroom to negotiate, only to be told there would be no negotiating. One full-on yelled at me for telling him I’d like to remove a bunch of add-ons to the car to lower the price, saying it was impossible to pull out rubber floor mats.
Another salesman wrote down all my information, consciously avoided giving me his business card, then failed to ever send me a price quote. At one dealership, a salesman gave me a once-over, decided based on my shoes (which he stared at) that I wasn’t a serious buyer, and treated me dismissively; when I returned the next day, he pawned me off on the most junior member of the staff, and managed to literally sell the car I wanted while I was on a test drive at the dealership. I repeat: miserable.
Not everyone was like that, though. One dealership was fair, levelheaded, and fully transparent in their pricing, although they were ultimately unable to source the car. Another had a sales manager who spoke with me patiently on the phone, multiple times, and aggressively dropped the price on the vehicle in order to win my business. I liked the price I got, but I also liked their style. I’m headed there this weekend to finish the transaction.
I took a peek in my WordPress admin and I have 143 draft posts. That’s a lot of half-finished thoughts! Some of them are just unpublished link logs, but plenty of them are actual content. The oldest draft post is from 2007.
I had a thought yesterday, working on my watch post (which I started in August, before my repair saga commenced), that I could spend some time this spring and summer resuscitating and posting all my draft posts. No way I do that now—how could I represent an idea from 2007 appropriately?
But maybe a handful are worth revisiting, and actually posting. Any that I do, and which dates back long enough, will have an annotation of when it was drafted. Let’s see if anything interesting comes of it.
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