Digital Bankruptcy

/
Digital Bankruptcy

In the final minutes of New Year’s Eve before our family and friends began to arrive at our home to celebrate the new year, I declared digital bankruptcy. 

Since a bankruptcy is designed to relieve someone of their financial debts, it was time for me to do that with most of my digital debts.

Over the last few weeks, I have been preparing to get rid of most of my digital debts. These digital debts were nearly all my own making, so I only had myself to blame. But to blame wasn’t my intention. Nor was it to sit with each piece of digital clutter and determine what I was going to do with it. The time for that had passed. I resolved (or removed) many of these digital debts before the last day of the year, but when it came down to it, I was going to trash it one fell swoop.

Read More

Twin Study - Vegan vs. Omnivore

/
Twin Study - Vegan vs. Omnivore

Last year, Mike (my identical twin brother) and I, along with 21 other pairs of identical twins participated in a medical study through the Stanford School of Medicine comparing vegan and omnivore diets. Last month, the first study results were published, and in just a few days, the Netflix documentary series about the study, You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, premieres.

Read More

52

/
52

Contrary to the popular adage, age isn’t “just a number”. Age isn’t just A number. Age is THE number. Quite literally, it might be the most important number of a person’s life. I am 52. If I walked up to you and, absent any context, proclaimed, “Hi, I’m Matt and I’m 52.” There would no doubt to what I was referring. I only get to live this one life, I was born once and I will die once… and aside from quality, age is the scoreboard. We only get to live on this earth for so long, and the goal for most is to have that number be as high as possible.

Read More

No Podcasts for Seven Days

/
No Podcasts for Seven Days

The older I get the more I understand how deep many of the habits of my life are engrained. I quit chewing tobacco a little over a decade ago, much to the satisfaction of my wife, after coming to the realization that it was a habit that negatively impacted my life more than in just the most obvious health related ways. Ever since then, I have worked to be aware of all my habits. The bad ones and the good ones.

I don’t claim to be the first person to listen to a podcast, but shortly after Apple started supporting them in iTunes (who remembers iTunes???) I was hooked. I immediately thought of the potential to have talk radio (a la NPR) on demand. And the medium went on to change my life in so many profound ways. But those are stories for another post.

Read More

The One Where I Mourn the Actor I Never Even Watched

/

I have never seen an episode of Friends. Ever.

Well, actually one time, in very early 2018, I was at our daughter’s house, and she had Friends on in the background… but I swear I never watched it. I was just aware that it was on.

For some strange reason, I’ve worn the “never watched Friends” badge with pride, as if I deserved some stupid medal for it.

Read More

Thanks for Wordle, Mr. Wardle

/
Thanks for Wordle, Mr. Wardle

I’m not quite an early adopter on this, but I have been playing Wordle since Saturday, January 8. I heard about it on the Kottke Ride Home podcast that previous week - the lovely story about Josh Wardle who created a word puzzle game for his partner - and then spent the next day and a half playing an app called Wordle, and not really understanding it.

Read More