MoodyTunes

Welcome news from the Land of Arbitrary Rules I Love: more and more professors are banning laptops in college classrooms.
This isn’t exactly news — laptop bans show up on many an English department syllabus in my neck of the woods — but it did re-stimulate my amazement at students tapping away on laptops in classes. [...]

A short Thursday post, with two links.
First, here’s a site called RainyMood.com. Visit the site, click on the giant Play button, and you’ll get a 15-minute loop of rainstorm noises. If you listen closely you’ll hear some music in the background. I think. It’s creepy. When I write I like to have music on, usually [...]

A random site update — comments on yesterday’s post reminded me to back up all the files related to this site. As a former IT professional I should know better than to go long periods of time without backing stuff up.
Thesis Time also means Procrastinating Time so I upgraded WordPress, too. That’s the software [...]

My New Year’s Eve fireworks proved to be a lot of fun, and I didn’t get in trouble or lose any digits. I’ll have to write up a full report later. I definitely got my $14 worth, that’s for sure. I even have some leftovers for when I want to celebrate random events throughout the [...]

I’m about to make another trip from Tennessee to South Carolina, and I’ve assigned myself a random project: I must listen to audio books along the way. Maybe not the whole way, but I want to make it through at least one recording of someone reading a story to me without tuning out after 4 [...]

I thought I’d dedicate a Thursday post to my coffee maker. I think it’s about five years old — a 4-cup Mr. Coffee that cost $10 at Target — and it’s as simple as you can get. I’ve had several coffee makers over the years and none of them deliver the same, consistent results as [...]

I’m considering story ideas involving the expansive field of “technology” and that has coincided nicely with rediscovering my game console and its various capabilities. Quite a few devices offer the ability to watch Netflix videos over an Internet connection, and I realized halfway through playing with that feature that my reaction was decidedly muted. And [...]

One of the alternately frightening and exciting aspects of leaving a stable, “Why would you ever quit THAT?” job and entering The Great Unknown Writing Life is the prospect of varied, small jobs. For varied, small money. I assure you: It’s a thrilling experience.
If it’s variety I wanted, it’s variety I got. I’m in the [...]