ODonnellWeb
ODonnellWeb
Chris O'Donnell
Launched on 12/31/1995, and updated regularly ever since. It's probably one of the oldest continually maintained personal websites on the WWW.
Latest Posts
Last fall we thought it would be a great idea to get out of the VA winter for a few days at the Hammock Coast Birding Festival south of Myrtle Beach. Average highs for the first week of February there are 61°F (16°C). We got in Wednesday...
It's Sunday morning, February 1st. These are 10 things I'm thinking about. It's fucking cold here. It's 19F (-5C) as I type this. I live in the South. I do not remember this kind of extended cold streak in my 28 years in Virginia. We are...
I've noticed that by about 10 AM most days I am done with the news. I'm deleting unread email newsletters and skipping over blog posts or Mastodon posts that have anything to do with current events. I just can't take it anymore. Then I...
Yep, I've stopped pretending that these will ever be weekly on a consistent basis. I simply do not have Andreas time management skills. He never misses a week. I'm going with Ryan's approach. If 2026 came with a 14-day warranty, I'd be...
Happy New Year. I hope this blog post finds you well, or at least not hungover. I went to bed at 10:40 PM last night, and turned off the lights around 11:30 PM. I was woken up at midnight by the commercial quality fireworks show somebody...
30 years of blogging. I don't even know what to do with that. The word blog had not been invented in 1995 when I launched this site, but from the early days I recognized the utility of giving people a reason to come back. So I was...
A silly thing that I do every year. 2025 in selfies
On to bigger and better things in 2026. If you are celebrating something, happy holidays! If not, happy Thursday!
I finished Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil last night. It ends up being a good book, but it takes a while to get there. It's a narrative non-fiction story covering an alleged murder in Savannah, GA. The book is highly atmospheric...
I have 46 books on the books page for 2025. Several are DNFs, and there are probably 5 more in-progress books that never made it to the page. These were my favorites. Reviews are all on the 2025 books page, so I'm not repeating them...
So, I've apparently gone from not writing weekly updates to only writing weekly updates. Is that an improvement? My big achievement this week was to redesign my consulting website. The previous one was a placeholder. It held the place...
Next weekend is the last weekend before Christmas. Are you done supporting destructive capitalism, uh, I mean buying gifts for friends and family? I am done. I even wrapped a few presents today. We used to go way overboard but have...
Happy first weekend in December to all who celebrate. We had our first snow of the year this week. It snowed 2.5 inches (6.3 cm) on Thursday night and Friday morning. They shut the city down on Friday. All schools, government offices,...
How the hell is it already December? It was Thanksgiving weekend here in the US. So a lot of us had 4 days off. All my other long weekends this year have involved travel, so although they were often fun, I typically came back tired. This...
I've gone from weekly updates to bi-monthly to monthly. That is not a good trend line. I need to work on that. My birthday was on Tuesday, celebrating my 58th trip around the sun. I always say I don't feel my age, and physically that is...