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I miss skiing
This has been an oddball winter in Washington, on account of the nearly complete absence of snow. But it has been too typical in another respect: Once again, I’m doing a horrible job of propping up the...
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Bill Walsh would have made this post better
The English language is in rougher shape and the world looks a little meaner and shallower today, because we lost Bill Walsh yesterday. The longtime Washington Post copy editor died of complications of...
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Mike Musgrove
This hasn’t been a good month for the extended Washington Post family. Last week, we lost Bill Walsh, and Wednesday inflicted the news that my onetime henchman Mike Musgrove died Monday. Mike and I...
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Lawn enemy number one: the Tree of Hell
Fourteen summers of battling the weeds in our lawn have left me with a weird, foliage-driven sense of the calendar. If I’m twisting loose chickweed with a weeding fork, it could be February but it...
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Self-employment is easier if you’re not at the mercy of health-insurance...
I am thankful every day that my wife has a good job that includes affordable health insurance for our family. But seeing the Republican Party attempt to demolish the Affordable Care Act over the past...
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A D.C. summer isn’t complete without a Fort Reno concert
I don’t get out to concerts much these days, but Monday allowed me to check out a couple of indie-rock bands for free. The Northwest D.C. venue I attended lacked such typical amenities as a bar, air...
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What part of “Share the Road” can’t some drivers understand?
My wife has an mercifully short commute to work, which most days she speeds up by biking there. Friday morning, that route led to a detour through an X-ray machine and a CT scanner. The fault: an idiot...
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When a work-from-home type gets a driving commute
One of the many ways I count myself lucky is that I haven’t had to drive to work since high school. No matter where I’ve lived around D.C, I’ve been able to get to my job by bus, Metro or on foot. And...
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Ranking my Nats postseason nightmares
It happened again. Of course it did. The Nationals’ 9-8 loss to the Cubs in Thursday’s National League Division Series game 5 stands apart from the team’s other postseason exits for how utterly...
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For tech journalists, this may not be the most wonderful time of the year
It’s almost the middle of December, which means I’m once again in the weeds with my CES planning, in the weeds with Christmas shopping, and in the weeds with writing stories in advance so I can maybe...
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2017 in review: This has not been easy
This year has been lousy in a variety of ways. On a national level, the Trump administration luxuriated in lies, cruelty, bigotry, and incompetence. We learned that even more men in power had spent...
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I finally remembered to ski
Taking a weekday off to go skiing is one of the more underrated perks of working a flexible schedule around D.C. So I enjoyed it Tuesday for the first time since 2015. When I started freelancing, that...
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Peak lawn
It’s the time of the year when I have to mow the lawn once a week. That means it’s also the best time of the year to mow the lawn. The spring wave of weeds has gone by now while spring’s rains have the...
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It’s been a trying week to keep a politically open mind
For years, one of the non-obvious pleasures of writing about tech policy has been knowing that the good and bad ideas don’t fall along the usual right/left lines. I might not want to hear Republicans...
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Of course I didn’t see how social media could be an accelerant for bigotry
It took a few years after I first reviewed Windows XP for me to realize the enormous omission from my initial assessment of that operating system: It didn’t even include the word “security.” It feels...
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Crystal City wasn’t so enticing in 1993
With the news Tuesday morning that Amazon will put one of its “HQ2” locations in Arlington, Crystal City–or “National Landing,” the name picked to encompass an Amazon realm that will reach some...
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This is the worst interface I’ve ever seen
Our water heater broke sometime Monday, and we found out the analog way: Only cold water came out of the tap. A visit to the basement revealed that the heater had already been reporting a problem in...
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2018 in review: security-minded
I spent more time writing about information-security issues in 2018 than in any prior year, which is only fair when I think about the security angles I and many of other people missed in prior years....
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My least-replicable travel hack: an Irish passport
Thursday, I wrapped up another trip to Europe that left me with zero passport stamps. I haven’t gotten any coming home since my Global Entry subscription kicked in five years ago, but I also haven’t...
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My other Father’s Day
Twenty years ago today, my dad died. It was a long day, and at times like this I feel like I’m still living it. March 26, 1999 started in the Bay Area, where I’d flown out for a friend’s wedding. I...
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