All the Spotify Wrappeds have dropped, so for the past week I've had at least one student a day show me theirs - and ask to see mine. They get very confused when I tell them I don't have Spotify. They get even more confused when I tell them I don't pay for any streaming services at all. "But...how do you get...

While snowed in over my long Thanksgiving weekend, I started thinking about the stuff online and how it interacts with the stuff in our brains. As requested by absolutely no one, behold: a framework for sorting the stuff on the Internet (and not on the Internet). 0: Slop "Slop" is the online stuff that is less than...

So after I totaled my car and the deer it hit: https://viewfromthepresent.com/2025-11-20 I had to buy another car. I haven't actually bought a car since 2009, when I, a hapless twentysomething, overpaid for a 2007 Toyota Yaris. I loved that car and drove it into the ground before lucking into the Corolla (aka "the...

On my way out to the farm for my niece's birthday this weekend, I hit a deer. I lost. The deer also lost. It is statistically inevitable, living where I do, that some percentage of drivers will hit deer in any given fall. It's actually kind of amazing that I've been driving here for 25 years, yet this is the first...

My 2.3 readers may remember I spent the summer doing Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. One point she covers throughout the 12-week process is "synchronicity," or the idea that when you're on the right path artistically, things just sort of line up for you. Every week's reflection questions included "did you...

I got an interesting attempt at phishing just now. It was a text message, modeled on the Google 2FA texts. The first sentence was identical to a Google text: "G-[number] is your Google verification code." The next two sentences, however, said there was a "login attempt" from "Antwerp, Belgium" (in case you confused...

Long time no blog. I've been getting through the first marking period, doing Librarian Stuff including prep to receive a donation of Literally One Thousand Books, No Really, Ten Hundred Books Someone is Donating To Us, Can You Believe It, I Still Don't. I guess I'm not getting fired this year, lol. As I come to the...

No, really. In Naked Economics, Charles Wheelan lists several factors essential to the growth and development of a national economy: effective government institutions property rights no excessive regulation geography openness to trade responsible fiscal and monetary policy human capital democracy peace woman power...

Good lord, it's like I'm an entirely different person. I started a list over lunch in an attempt to track what-all I've changed since January 7, when I clicked on Janet Vertesi's Cyber-Cleanse in someone else's CoSo post and thought "well, I'm already not using Chrome for a browser, I wonder what email options exist...

I have one of Those Uncles. You know. The kind who smugly inform you at every Thanksgiving that “if you’re not a conservative by age 40, you don’t have a brain.” Said Uncle has been consternated for decades that law school, a brief career in insurance litigation, and then starting my own business failed to turn me...

Present Me is notorious for committing Future Me to things that Future Me cannot deliver. Present Me is also notorious for not realizing this until Present Me becomes Future Me, at which point Present Me curses the name of Past Me for getting Present Me into this mess. Such is the situation at the start of this...