If you’re on a phone, and click a link to something on the Mac App Store, this is the screen you get:

This seems like a missed opportunity. At the very minimum, you should get information about the app– the same kind of web page you get when you (on a PC) click a link to an iOS app and don’t have iTunes installed.

• Washington DC MongoDB Users Group (ical)
• DC Selenium Meetup (ical)
• Federal Innovative Technology (FIT): Cloud and Mobile (ical)
• OpenStack DC (ical)
• Programmer’s Book Club (ical)
• Washington DC Area Groovy User Group (ical)
• DMV Titanium User’s Group (ical)

Union Station, a column between tracks 23 and 24.

The lady of the house says, of a get-together we’re attending tomorrow: “we can bring salad or desert”.

Me, pretending to think about it: “how about… desert”?

I’ve been compiling a list of things to try making (using Omnifocus, of course. There’s probably a blog post in that), and pound cake was on there. I read through some recipes online and in books (Ratio and How to Cook Everything). Primarily because Bittman wanted me to separate all of the egg yolks and Ruhlman didn’t, I followed the Ratio instructions.

The glaze is improvised– I threw together about a half cup of sugar, maybe a cup and a half of cider, and a few squirts of lemon juice, and boiled it until I got tired of doing that.

How does it taste? I won’t know until tomorrow night.

At the end of my twice-weekly physical therapy sessions, they hook me up to this electric stimulation machine.

The menu at Oh Fish!

I’ve maintained a blog on and off for most of the past decade. I helped organize the blogging community in Harrisburg, PA, met a lot of cool people, and the thing that defines my personal brand and opened as many doors for me as much as anything else (DC Tech Events) started off as a weekly blog post.

Blogging has been good to me.

The point has been made that everyone is a blogger these days– they just call it Twitter and Facebook. Having a domain name with your own private writing space has become weird and geeky again, like it was in 2002.

I still think it’s useful to have my own outpost on the web, that I can customize, hack, and migrate between hosting providers and platforms. I’ve considered making that outpost something other than a blog, but this suits me for the moment.

I don’t lack things to say, and blogging about blogging is particularly asinine. I just need to get back in the habit.

I consider myself a comics newbie.  In 2003 I wandered into Comix Connection on my lunch break, and walked out with Planetary/Batman. This was a baffling place to start– the book is a sort of riff on comic book history, of which I was (and by some measures am still) pretty ignorant. Planetary is Warren Ellis‘ “archaeologists of the impossible” story, which (to me) plays out a bit like the X-Files in a truly fantastic version earth: a world where much of the past 200 years of popular fiction (including comics) was true (or had some basis in fact). In Planetary/Batman the team finds themselves tripping between alternate versions of Gotham City, each with it’s own Batman incarnation to deal with– only some of which were familiar to me.

I soon caught up with Planetary, and then moved on to other books– sticking mostly with Ellis for a while (Transmetropolitan, The Authority), but gradually branching out. Now I count Ellis, Mike Carey, John Hickman, and Brian Wood as favorite authors.

Besides The Authority and the occasional Batman book, I’ve mostly avoided super hero stuff.  Also, Grant Morrison.

I knew there was this thing called a ”Grant Morrison” that a lot of people seemed to like– it just never occurred to me to take a look, until this Grinding.be article on (among other things) Batman, Inc convinced me to give it a read. That led me to some of Morrison’s other Batman stuff, and more recently to start working through (and really enjoying) The Invisibles.

It was entirely a coincidence that I saw Morrison’s Supergods on Audible, and it’s a great listen. About half the book is a straightforward history of superheroes, from Superman and Batman’s first appearance in comics to the current rash of TV and movies, to the costumed vigilantes who have started appearing in American cities. The other half is a deep-dive into Morrison’s life story and psyche– which is more interesting than you might think. Consider that he was simultaneously experimenting with psychedelic drugs, shamanism, and cross-dressing, while writing The Invisibles.

Actually, if you’ve read The Invisibles, that isn’t much of a shock.