Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 5
March 5, 2025
Streaks, Setbacks, and Spaceflight
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="space rocket launching" class="wp-image-26078" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1880w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1800w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" />Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.comI try to walk twice a day: once first thing in the morning, then again around lunchtime. I do a pretty good job, especially in the mornings. I’d guess that I manage to get out 330-340 days each year. Even when we travel, I get my early morning walks in. It was on one such walk in Budapest this past summer that I visited the birthplace of John von Neumann.
Weather is the most common reason I don’t get out in the morning. I will walk in the rain, in the snow, in the blistering heat. I draw the line when two negative weather conditions converge. Windy cold, windy rain, etc. Being sick is a less common reason for skipping my morning walk. A mild sickness won’t keep me in, but a few weeks back, the flu hit me, and for three days I didn’t get out for a walk. Then, the weather turned cold, and being sick, my motivation was low, and there was about a week when I was not getting out for my walks.
I listen to books while I walk. It’s one of the things that motivates me to get out there. It so happened that a few days ago, I started a new book first thing in the morning as I set out for a walk. It was still cold, but I had to get out there, and I was looking forward to this book. The book was Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham. The book came out last May and I usually gobble up books about the space program. I hesitated only because I lived through the Challenger disaster. I was in school when it happened, and while I didn’t see it live on TV like some of my friends did, I remember explaining to them (not having seen the accident) that they could have performed an ATO (Abort to Orbit) and survived. The news that evening set me straight and I think I read everything about it in the papers in the days that followed.
With a book like this, there is always a risk that the writer won’t handle the material well. I needn’t have worried. The book set just the right tone, engaged me from the start, and made me walk slowly, rather than my usual quick pace: slowly, because it meant I could listen longer.
Since I started the book, I haven’t missed a walk, morning or afternoon. I look forward to more of the book. As I write this, I’m about halfway through, and already I’m eager to get up for my morning walk to get through more of the book. And a little bummed. The book will eventually end, and it is always tough to follow a great book. The rebound book never quite lives up. Also, we turn the clocks forward on Saturday and that means it will be dark again at 6am when I head out. At least for a little while.
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March 4, 2025
Attack of the Floating Blob
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="blue and brown abstract painting" class="wp-image-26063" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1880w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1800w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1840w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" />Photo by Artem Podrez on Pexels.comIn a recent meeting, a vendor was speaking to a large group of people with mixed technical experience. They mentioned “blob storage” and I felt compelled to interject for the benefit of those folks who’d never heard the term that despite sounding like a warehouse for Hollywood 1950s B-movie props, blob storage was, for our purposes, a kind of file system. This drew a few laughs. It also dredged up an ancient memory, something from nearly half a century past. Something about floating blobs.
I couldn’t have been more than five years old. My bedroom was at the end of what seemed to me like an enormously long hallway. Looking back, the hallway couldn’t possibly have been that long, but I was small, and my perceptions of the world not fully evolved. Plus, it was early in the morning, and I had just woken up.
It was early on a Saturday morning. I know this because on Saturdays, I would go into the family room on the other side of the house and watch Saturday morning cartoons. This was the mystery and spin-off era of Hanna-Barbera and they dominated Saturday morning. One big exception, I think, was The Bugs Bunny Road-Runner Show. The TV, at the time, sat in the northwest corner of the family room. The floor was blue tiles. There was a couch in front of the front windows. I think I just sat on the floor.
To get from my bedroom to the family room was a bit of a hike for a youngster early in the morning. I’d proceed from my room down this long hallway into the living room. There was a TV here and a very maroon and possibly velvet couch. To the left was an opening that led toward the front door. Continuing straight led to the dining room. I’d turn left and pass through the dining room then through the kitchen. On the other side of the kitchen was the family room.
On this particular morning, I awoke bleary-eyed, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and eager to watch cartoons. The house was silent; in my memory I wore footie pajamas and took a few steps into the hallway. For some reason, I turned back to look at my bedroom—and that’s when I saw it: a big blob floating in my vision. It startled me. I took a step back and the blob seemed to follow me. I took a few more careful steps and then broke into a run. Just before I turned left toward the kitchen, I glanced over my shoulder and that blob was still there. It was chasing me!
By the time I made it into the family room, breathless and no doubt hiding behind something, the blob was gone. The TV was there. It was time for cartoons, and I turned my attention to the important business of TV-watching.
At some point, much later, I realized what had happened. Rubbing my eyes, caused some sort of distortion which made me see the blob. It followed me because the distortion was in my eye—like floaters are today. Of course, I knew none of this at the time. It seems amusing now, in retrospect, but I still remember the feeling of terror I had during the attack of the floating blob.
Perhaps because of that terror, I have always remembered this incident, and it has made me extra sensitive to my own kids’ fears of the unknown and unexplained when they were young.
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March 3, 2025
A Delightful Alternate History of Cussed Computer Errors
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="monitor displaying error text" class="wp-image-26039" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1880w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1800w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" />Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.comI am not a casual user of profanity, obscenity, or vulgarity. Despite being surrounded by people and media where casual use is de rigueur, I choose not to use it. It doesn’t bother me much when I hear it used, and I don’t mind it in TV shows and movies, although I appreciate the cleverness of writers who can write without resorting to such idioms. I went through a phase in seventh grade where I used obscenities the way I used “like” as a kind of verbal placeholder.
Today, there is one thing that will pierce my obscenity armor: encountering a bug in code I wrote. I will build a project (if it is compiled) or execute it if it is at runtime, and when the thing fails, I will frequently resort to an obscenity of the level F variety. I suspect many coders are familiar with this feeling.
Users of software are familiar with bugs, but bugs are not necessarily the same as errors. An error will cause a program to halt or prevent code from compiling. These are bugs, but some bugs are not errors in code; they are errors in implementation.
That is, the code runs fine, but the resulting behavior is unexpected or undesired. When I started writing BASIC code in the 1980s these were called “errors.” Today, we call these “exceptions” and have all kinds of clever ways to trap them and work around them. When these traps and clever workarounds fail, I find myself muttering obscenities—or what a friend in my youth referred to as “cusses.”
I had cusses on the brain because of a delightful anecdote I recently read. There is a kind of truism in my reading experience that some of the best anecdotes come from the most obscure sources. In this case, a wonderful history of the development of the navigation software for the Apollo lunar module, SUNBURST and LUMINARY: An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles. I was reading this the other day as I walked to pick up our youngest daughter from school, navigating by my own complicated system whereby I keep half an eye in front of me while the remaining eye-and-a-half scans the pages.
The history of computing is filled with stories true and apocryphal—sometimes both. The story of the origin of a “bug” as I heard it, was that an insect of some kind was caught in a printer, preventing it from printing. “Hacking,” which has a kind of subversive connotation, originally meant nothing more than writing clever code.
As I walked to my daughter’s school, crossing a large green field, I read the following passage:
The assembler kept a copy of the current version of each program and gave you the ability to modify and add to it. It enforced the language rules and when it detected an error it issued a cuss—Blair-Smith’s whimsical term for an error message.
Never had I encountered a more perfect description of an error message in computer code, than a “cuss.” It succinctly captures not only the fact of the error but the resulting feelings that said error generates within the programmer.
Moreover, it describes perfectly the feeling of a user of software who encounters what we today so inadequately refer to as a “bug.” In that instant I had a vision of a delightful alternate history of computing where errors, and perhaps even bugs, were cusses. “Hey, Joe, there’s a cuss in this subroutine!” Or: “I found another cussed cuss in Microsoft Word.” I imagined code reviews where we look at the list of outstanding cusses.
In fact, my imagination took off with this. Math shares some relationship to coding. I imagined my 7th grade pre-algebra teacher reviewing my homework and noting a cuss I made in my calculation. Or my English teacher marking the spelling cusses I made in my paper. Or a shortstop booting a play and allowing a runner to get on base, the official scorer charging him with a cuss.
It was at this point in my reverie that I walked into the telephone pole at the far end of the field. I just walked knee-first right into the pole. Without thinking, I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Syntax error.”
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March 2, 2025
Shelf-Life #3: John Adams
Some books are like the pebbles that start an avalanche. John Adams by David McCullough was one such pebble for me. In the late spring of 2001, one could not walk into the Book Star near the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevards without seeing row after row of hardcover editions of John Adams arrayed at the front of the store. I don’t know exactly what it was that attracted me to the book. I wasn’t a biography reader. But at some point, probably on June 2 or 3, I finally forked out the money for a copy. The first mention of the book in my diary was on June 5, 2001: “I am absolutely loving John Adam—possibly the best book I’ve read this year so far.”
This was a book I savored. By the next day, I wrote that I was nearly 190 pages through the book and “eating it up!” On the 13th I was through 450 pages. Back then, I didn’t read as much as I do today; I could linger over a book for a month or more. I finally finished the book on July 2, 2001, while in Castine, Maine. On that day I wrote, “Spent most of the afternoon on the deck under beautiful, partly cloudy skies and warm sun, reading and nearly finishing John Adams. It was the ultimate relaxation, and I tried to relish every minute of it.” Later that day, I finished the book “and it was definitely the best book I’ve read this year so far.” It turned out to be one of the best books I’ve ever read, period.
John Adams caused an avalanche in me. At least three things changed after I read that book, slowly, like the pebbles gathering speeds through the force of gravity. It made me love biographies. It created in me a fascination with U.S. Presidents. And it reminded me of my youthful interest in Colonial American history.
Prior to John Adams, I’d never really been interested in biographies, mainly due to lack of exposure. I went through the list of books I remember reading before I started keeping a list in 1996, and I couldn’t find any biographies on the list. That changed after reading John Adams. In 2000, I read Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos by William Poundstone. This is the first biography (excluding memoirs and autobiographies) that appears on my reading list, and it took me over four years before I finally decided to read a biography. A year later, I read John Adams, and the avalanche began to build. Over the next quarter century, I read more than 150 biographies alone. The graph below illustrates the progression of this avalanche.
On the drive back to New York from Maine, I couldn’t stop thinking about the book. I was frantic to read another biography, one that was just as good. As I neared my destination, I passed by a mall where I saw a Barnes & Noble. I pulled off, went in and bought a copy of Truman by David McCullough. I figured I’d stick with McCullough for now since I enjoyed John Adams so much. Less than two weeks after I finished John Adams, I’d also zipped through Truman. I was hooked!
For a long time after reading John Adams, when someone asked me who my favorite president was, I’d answer without hesitation, John Adams. I clarify almost at once that I didn’t think he was the best president, just my favorite. There was a something about his character, his intelligence, and his integrity that impressed me. In recent years, John Adams has been dethroned as my favorite by his son, John Quincy Adams. I’ve now read more biographies of JQA than John Adams. For decades now, I’ve thought that the presidency was a role that was virtually impossible to prepare for. That said, if there was any one person who was “prepared” to be president, it was John Quincy Adams. By the time JQA was my age, he had served in the Massachusetts Senate, as a U.S. Senator for the state of Massachusetts, as Minister to the Netherlands, Minister to Prussia, Minister to Russia, Minister to the United Kingdom, and while at about my age was halfway through his term as Secretary of State. All of this before he became President. Then, after he served a term as President, he spent the next seventeen years in the House of Representatives.
John Adams also got me interested in the role of the President. Having devoured biographies of two presidents, back-to-back, I decided I should read at least one biography of every president. Like many of my reading adventures, I didn’t put a timeline on this, or even a plan. It would happen organically, but at some point I’d get there. I did impose a couple of rules: (1) the book had to be a presidential biography, not a memoir or autobiography; (2) I would shy away from those presidents who are still alive today. In the years since first reading John Adams, I’ve managed to read 51 biographies of 16 U.S. presidents, or about 35% of the total, ranging from George Washington to George W. Bush (the one exception to my rule #2):
#PresidentBooks1George Washington22John Adams53Thomas Jefferson84James Madison16John Quincy Adams316Abraham Lincoln318Ulysses S. Grant120James A. Garfield226Theodore Roosevelt632Franklin D. Roosevelt533Harry S. Truman234Dwight D. Eisenhower336Lyndon B. Johnson437Richard Nixon140Ronald Reagan243George W. Bush2John Adams also rekindled my interest in Colonial American history. From second to fifth grades, I lived in Warwick, Rhode Island and became engrossed in colonial history. Across the street from our house, and up a small hill was a graveyard surrounded by a stone wall that dated back to before the Revolution. Some of the graves had rusted markers that indicated military service in the Revolutionary War. We went on field trips to Boston, and Sturbridge Village, an old colonial town in Massachusetts. From the age of 7-1/2 to the age of 11-1/2 I was immersed in colonial history. John Adams reminded me of that history and I began to read more broadly about colonial history.
I’ve read McCullough’s John Adams three times, and I enjoy it more with each subsequent reading. There is a humble passage that has stuck with me ever since my first reading. It concerns Adams when he was still a young lawyer in Boston:
Long before, on his rounds of Boston as a young lawyer, Adams had often heard a man with a fine voice singing behind the door of an obscure house. One day, curious to know who “this cheerful mortal” might be, he had knocked at the door, to find a poor shoemaker with a large family living in a single room. Did he find it hard getting by, Adams had asked. “Sometimes,” the man said. Adams ordered a pair of shoes. “I had scarcely got out the door before he began to sing like a nightingale,” Adams remembered. “Which was the greatest philosopher? Epictetus or this shoemaker?” he would ask when telling the story.
I’ve thought about this passage every time I find myself wishing for better circumstance, seeing the grass greener over there. It has reminded me for decades to be happy with what I have, to enjoy it, to be moderate and abstemious.
Adams took the small things to heart and tried to appreciate them for what they were. After a winter storm damaged his trees, he wrote about the beauty of the scene, concluding with:
I have seen a Queen of France with eighteen millions of livres of diamonds upon her person and I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub. The whole world was glittering with precious stones.
McCullough shows that Adams was a complicated, but principled character. This book made such an impression on me when I first read it, that I feel an almost proprietary concern for the Adames. When I read in other histories and biographies, of contemporaries of Adams disparaging him, I am offended on his behalf, even though I recognize the flaws they point out. Adams made plenty of mistakes and took measures that I disagree with from my safe modern perch. But his character, intelligence, and integrity are what most impress about him. He served one term as president, but his legacy led to John Quincy Adams, another U.S. president, diplomat, and congressman; Charles Francis Adams, who was U.S. envoy to the United Kingdom for Abraham Lincoln; and Henry Adams, whose The Education of Henry Adams is the #1 book on Modern Library’s Top 100 Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century.
There are a handful of writers, now gone, that I wish would have written more. David McCullough was one of those writers. John Adams was my first exposure to his writing, but over the years, I managed to read every book he published, and all of them without exception were excellent. In an interview with McCullough late in his life, he said that he has a list of 20 or more projects that he wanted to work on. Since his death, I’ve often wondered if he had made enough progress on any of them to bring them close to completion. Would I see a posthumous McCullough book sometime in the future? It turns out the answer to this question is yes, I will. While performing a periodic search of forthcoming books, I discovered History Matters by David McCullough and edited by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson. The book is described as a “posthumous collections of thought-provoking essays—many never published before… McCullough affirms the value of history, how we can be guided by its lessons, and the enduring legacy of American ideals.” The book is due out September 16, 2025. I’ve already pre-ordered it.
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March 1, 2025
A Busy Saturday
I wasn’t going to post anything today. I felt I should deliberately not post anything to avoid getting fixated on a streak. But I did want to remind folks that Episode 3 of my new series, “Shelf-Life,” is coming out tomorrow morning.
I think I did pretty well this week, considering how busy things have been. I am, at present, managing the largest and most complex project I’ve managed to-date at work. I spent a year-and-a-half leading the discovery effort on this one, and now we have moved to implementation. It involves a lot of people and a lot of moving parts and I’m still wrapping my head around it.
Thinking about that reminded me of the first big company-wide project I worked on, which was our Y2K efforts. That started in mid-1998 or so. The web was different back then, and earlier this week, I wrote fondly of the old web. I was busy enough this week to prevent my from writing ahead, and so I made use of a post I’d written nearly a year ago, which talks about how my real hobby is learning.
There were some pleasant surprises, like the most recent issue of Smithsonian magazine, which contained an article about the years of Robert Caro, a writer and biographer I particularly enjoy. I found myself repeatedly distracted in my reading, which led me to write about my book stack management. And I confessed to a seemingly unshakable propensity to create complicated systems. I think I may finally be breaking that habit.
Usually, I’ve got all our tax papers ready to send to the accountant by the second weekend in February. That got delayed this year and has been weighing on me. I woke up this morning, and after returning from my morning walk, sat at my desk with the with resolve not to rise until that work was done. It took nearly three hours, but that work is done, and I have since arisen from my desk. Now I’ve returned to give tomorrow’s Shelf-Life post a final read, and to write Monday’s post, and possibly Tuesday’s. We have friends coming over for dinner so I’m trying to have all of that off my plate before they arrive.
How is your Saturday going?
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February 28, 2025
The Systematic Problem of Building Productivity Systems
I have this terrible propensity to build up systems because the systems offered off-the-shelf seem inadequate for my needs. When I used Evernote, I couldn’t just use it “off-the-shelf” so to speak, I had to build systems around it. When I started using Obsidian, I did the same. In the days when I wrote in Google Docs, I had to build out an elaborate system for tracking my writing. I never really stopped to wonder why I feel the need to build up these systems. But I have often asked myself why the off-the-shelf products aren’t good enough for me.
The answer to the first question—why I feel the need to build up these systems in the first place—is more about the challenge and less about the benefits than I like to admit. I build software systems for a living, so why not take advantage of that skillset? On the one hand it consumes countless hours that I could spend on other things; on the other hand, it hones my skills. This probably explains why I move from system to system. Once I’ve built up my system, the fun part is over. Using the system, the practical part is, well, boring. I find another system to build and see how I can improve based on lessons I learned the last time around.
The answer to the second question is simpler: in 99.9% of the cases, the off-the-shelf product is good enough for me, but I choose to complicate things.
Recently, I built up another big system—my personal archive system (PAS for short)—that has finally let me step back and assess my use of systems in general. The PAS does a lot of what I’ve wanted with respect to archiving and searching my documents in the way I want it done, and in doing so, has freed me up to use software off-the-shelf, without feeling compelled to tweak it, or integrate it, or use it in a way it wasn’t designed to be used.
Recently (thanks to my PAS!) I was looking at some old documents—college course notes and papers I’d written, some of the oldest computer files I still have, dated from 1993 and 1994. I wrote these papers and typed up my notes in Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5, which today, remains my favorite of all the word processors I’ve ever used1. I thought about those college days. No one had laptops. These were pre-internet days. I sat in lectures and scribbled notes in a notebook using a kind of shorthand that evolved over time. Later, I’d sit at my IBM PC 286, fire up Word for DOS, and type up my notes. When it came time to write a paper, I’d open a new file and start writing. I didn’t worry about formatting beyond 1-inch margins and double-spaced text. I just typed and saved.
Word for DOS 5.5.In the grand scheme of things, not much has changed. All I really need to do these days is type—for the most part, things are saved automatically for me. I don’t need to worry about formatting. Templates take care of that for me. I don’t need an elaborate system—my PAS is that system and it automates those things I’ve always wanted to have so that I don’t even have to think about it. The system is working so well, in fact, that I haven’t touched the code in two months.
Indeed, the PAS has allowed me to simplify my systems. I’ve written this most recent sprint of posts (the last 14, including this one) in Microsoft Word in a simple template without worrying about other systems or automations. When I finish a post, I use an LLM to proofread it and find my typos—but I correct them myself and occasionally ignore suggestions. I copy and paste the text into WordPress, which handles all the formatting. And you know what? Not using an elaborate system is freeing. It is, in fact, a relief! It feels like the old days, before I was aware of personal productivity trends, and I spent my time being productive, instead of spending it building systems to make me productive.
My use of word processors goes back to AppleWorks, sometime in the mid-80s.
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February 27, 2025
Book Stack Management
Software developers using lower-level languages sometimes resort to using a memory region known as a stack. A stack functions on a LIFO or last-in, first-out principle. You push something onto the stack, and then you push something else onto the stack, and you can’t get to the first thing until you pop the top thing off the stack.
Lately, it seems, I manage the books I’m reading in a similar fashion. My “stack” sits on my nightstand. As my attention wanders from one shiny subject to another, books pop onto the stack, and the stack grows. I then must finish the book at the top of the stack (or push another book on) before I go back to an earlier book where I made a mental promise to finish it. My current “stack” stands four books deep.
The current stack.Here is what happened:
While reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings a few weeks back, I was, in the evenings, also reading a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien by Humphrey Carpenter. So far, so good. Then, at the annual St. Ann Book Fair, I came across an interesting book by Daniel J. Boorstin. It turned out that this book was part of a 3-part series on humanity’s pursuit of knowledge. This is one of many subjects that fascinates me. I very much enjoyed, for instance, Simon Winchester’s books related to this subject: The Professor and the Madman, The Man Who Loved China, The Meaning of Everything, and of course, Knowing What We Know. When I saw this series, I was overcome with a sudden, passionate need to read it.
I pushed the book onto the stack, promising myself I’d come back to the Tolkien biography once I finished this Boorstin book, which I started reading at once.
Except, not long after starting the Boorstin book, I started to flip through another recent addition, The Best American Sports Writing of the Century edited by David Halberstam. I told myself it couldn’t hurt to read the introduction. After reading the introduction, however, I felt compelled to read on. I pushed the book onto the stack, making another promise to finish The Discoverers once I finished the Halberstam book.
The Halberstam book was a kind of balm each evening to days of unsettling news reports. I made it a third of the way into the book when, as fate would have it, in my search for Tindallgrams, I came across a book on the history of the development of the Apollo LM guidance computer: Sunburst and Luminary by Don Eyles. Now, over the course of years, I’ve read just about every book I could find on the Apollo space program: histories, memoirs, biographies, technical books, you name it. This was one I hadn’t come across, and it had the added benefit of dealing with computer code, which is sort of what I deal with during the day. Well, in the grand scheme of things, space exploration trumps baseball, so I pushed Sunburst and Luminary onto the stack and started reading. Which is where things now stand.
A stack, as it turns out, is a good mechanism for one function to call another. The first function is pushed onto the stack, it calls a second function, which is pushed onto the stack. That in turn calls a third, etc. When the final function completes, it pops off the stack, and the previous function continues until it is complete, at which point it pops off the stack. The first function may then call another function that gets pushed onto the stack, so it could be a while before that very first function finally gets popped off the stack.
Which means that when I finish Sunburst and Luminary, I will return to The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. When I finish that, I will return to The Discoverers. Since The Discoverers is the first in a trilogy, there is a chance that The Creators will get pushed onto the stack, followed by The Seekers. When I finish those, I’ll finally get back to the biography of Tolkien. And once that is finished, the stack will be empty.
But the fact is—and this is the wonderful thing about reading—the stack is never empty. The butterfly effect of reading ensures that something is always being pushed on, and if something is popped off, there is always something to go back to.
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February 26, 2025
The Years of Robert Caro
One of the joys of magazines is the variety they provide. They are like old radio stations, where you can flip through channels to listen to a particular flavor of music, but are also limited to the music they play. Once and a while, a favorite band plays a new song, and it is exciting. That’s how I feel about the magazines I read. Every now and then, a writer will come out with a new piece—John McPhee in the New Yorker, for instance. Or there will be an article that is right up my alley, that pushes all the right buttons.
This happened recently when the March 2025 issue of Smithsonian arrived in my mailbox. The first thing I do when I get a new issue of a magazine is scan the table of contents1 to see if there is anything of particular interest. That is how I discovered the feature article by Chris Heath, “The Years of Robert Caro2.”
I’ve read all of Robert A3. Caro’s books to date. I’ve read The Power Broker, which was fascinating, but which I had to take breaks on because Robert Moses angered me so much. I’ve read the first four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and like many Caro fans, am eagerly awaiting (with fingers crossed) the final volume. I’ve also read his book Working. Indeed, I have a signed copy of the book.
My signed copy of Working by Robert A. Caro.Heath’s article comes in the context of a permanent exhibit from Caro’s archive established at the New York Historical Society, which has changed its name to New York Historical, something that reads like a typo to me. The article was a profile of Caro and his work and focused on his writing and his writing habits, as well as his research and attention to detail. It was a wonderful, delightful read, one of those rare reads that I save for a time when I can go through the entire thing in a single sitting.
If you are a fan of Caro, I highly recommend Heath’s piece.
WIRED magazine annoys me in this regard because their table of contents, for feature articles is displayed along the bottom of a page and it makes it hard to find.︎It also annoys me that the print edition of the magazine uses a different title from the online version of the magazine. I’ve written about this before. It might be good for clicks, but it creates unnecessary confusion. ︎Each time I’ve started typing out “Robert A. Caro,” I’ve instead typed “Robert A. Heinlein.” ︎Did you enjoy this post?
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February 25, 2025
My Hobby Is Learning
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="person holding magnifying glass pointing on book" class="wp-image-24911" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1440w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" />Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.comI. The Wrong HobbyFor as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer of some kind. I didn’t start writing with the idea of submitting and selling pieces until my junior year in college. But even before then, I wrote. In third grade, I wrote a story about two friends who explore Moscow (this was 1980 and we were reading about Russia in social studies). In junior high school, I wrote a long, involved story about a guy named Steve, almost none of which I remember–except that I wrote it in AppleWorks on an Apple ][e computer. In high school, my friend Eric and I collaborated on a series of stories that we began writing on the brown paper bag book covers that covered our chemistry textbooks. Ultimately, we typed up those stories, printed, and distributed them among fellow students and they proved pretty popular. But it wasn’t until college that I got serious about writing.
Looking back, it wasn’t that serious. It couldn’t have been; it took me 14 years of occasional writing, submitting, collecting rejections, resubmitting, and writing anew before I sold my first story. Sales came faster after that, but not as quickly as they might have if I wrote more often. That should have been the first clue on this journey of discovery.
Fast-forward to December 2023. I was on vacation with the family in Florida. For some reason, I was thinking about my career, and realizing that I was getting close to the end. I did some math in my head and figured I was about 100 months away from retiring. What then? I told myself I wanted to write. But I’d struggled writing fiction since about 2015 or so. But an idea hit me like lightning: what if I tried to write a 100 stories between now and the time I retired? It would amount to about a story a month. The idea caught fire with me. I could barely sleep; I was so excited by it. I decided I’d tackle it the way I tackle big projects in my day job. If it was well-organized, it would go a long way toward succeeding. I made plans, I put together spreadsheets to help me set and track the right pace. I clarified my goals. I was a little worried that I’d be able to come up with a good idea each month, but one problem at a time. And then, lightning struck again, and I had an idea for a story I was excited to write.
On January 1, 2024, I sat down for my first fiction writing session in a long time. The story moved quickly. On January 5, I’d completed the first draft. The second draft took longer, but it was done on January 11. In early February, my writers group critiqued the story and gave me good feedback. On Valentine’s Day, I mailed off the story to a magazine, my first unsolicited submission in more than 11 years. It felt great. I immediately moved on to story number 2.
And hit a wall.
I made a discovery, or perhaps, was finally willing to admit something I’d suspected for a long time. There are some fiction writers out there who are incredibly prolific. I am not one of them. There is a feeling I get about a story and it drives me forward. If I don’t have that feeling, there is no drive. I had it for the first story, but not the second. The flaw in this great plan of mine was not the plan itself. It was the idea that I could find inspiration once a month. For fiction, at least, that just isn’t something I can do. In the past, this would have bothered me, but today I am okay with that. Because along the way, I made another discovery.
II. The Right HobbyWriting fiction is hard. Writing fiction is work. With rare exceptions (like this most recent story in January) writing fiction doesn’t make me happy. It frustrates me. It makes me feel inadequate. I find myself browsing books and thinking, How is it all of these people managed to get published?
I don’t mind hard work. Indeed, I thrive on it. But I’ve also been lucky enough to do work that generally makes me happy. Was there some hobby besides writing fiction that made me happy? Writing for the blog makes me happy, and I’ve certainly been remiss in that regard recently. The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized that there was a hobby that made me happy. It was a hobby that has made me happy for as long as I’ve been able to do it.
Reading.
And not just reading, but learning. Over the years, I’ve trended away from reading fiction and toward nonfiction not because I don’t like fiction, but because nonfiction teaches me things. I try to take practical knowledge from everything I read. I want to know about everything. I want to know how the universe works at the macroscopic level and the microscopic level. I want to know everything in between. Everything I read captures my interest in some way or another.
What is the point of all of this knowledge I get from reading? I’ll admit it makes me feel good when I can answer a question or provide an insight, although I try hard to prevent coming off as a know-it-all. That’s not difficult because I know far from all. But now and then, while dozing off, I wonder about what good this knowledge really is. One day, my power will go out and all of this accumulated knowledge in my head will vanish like erased bits in random access memory. So what is the point?
It was something that Edward Gibbon wrote before he penned The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He wrote:
The history of empires is that of the misery of man. The history of knowledge is that of his greatness and happiness.
The history of knowledge is that of his greatness and happiness.
I think that was all I needed to hear. If knowledge brings happiness, no other justification is needed.
III. My Hobby is LearningI have altered my 100-month plan. I’ve taken off the 100-month cap. My goal is to continue to learn as much as I can, to continue to read widely, learn new things, revisit old favorites, find new connections. I am happy to write about this hobby of mine–witness my new series, Shelf-Life–since, unlike fiction, this type of writing comes much more easily to me. If lightning strikes and a story idea catches fire with me, I’ll take the time to write that, too.
Otherwise, learning is my hobby. It is the hobby that makes me most happy. It is the hobby that first caught fire with me when I wandered with my mom through the stacks of books in the Franklin Township Public Library and came across a copy of a book called The Nine Planets by Franklyn M. Branley. I still remember the thrill I got reading that book. Why not? After all, it is the same thrill I get when I turn to the first page of any book I pick up and begin to read.
Post Scripts
In full transparency, I wrote this post back in the spring of 2024. Despite being Tuesday, I had a busy day yesterday and completely ran out of time to write something new. Fortunately, I have a few pieces in reserve that I never finished, so I was able to wrap this one up and get it out today. Hopefully, today, I’ll have some time to write for later in the week.Did you enjoy this post?
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February 24, 2025
The Old Web
Every now and then, I come across a website that reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Take, for example, the computer science professors Brian Kernighan and Donald Knuth. Kernighan’s site is a little more elaborate than Knuth’s. For those who remember the early days of the Internet, Knuth’s site looks pretty close, but both remind me of the old days.
There is a delightful simplicity to early web pages that I miss in the modern web. Information was made available with the barest formatting. You had headers and bullets and simple, often clunky-looking tables. You could insert images if you wanted.
There is a parallel, I think, between the old web and old word processors. WordPerfect and Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5 (the latter was my personal favorite) had text-only displays that allowed you to focus on what you were writing. There was no WYSIWYG to distract you. More time was spent writing because less time was spent fidgeting with the presentation. Indeed, this was part of the reason the schools and publishers had simple formatting guidelines: 1-inch margins, double-spaced text, etc. It was not a writer’s job to worry about presentation.
When I come across an old-style web page, I feel a sudden sense of envy. I feel like I want to throw off the shackles of style and CSS and just present the text in its rawest form. The old web had its own built-in style and that seemed more than enough at the time. Formatting was an afterthought, unless it was the infamous tag that made text flash annoyingly on the screen. You went to a web page to read the text, not to be dazzled by the design. It reminds me of those bullet journals that look like works of art versus the ones that are messy scribbles on a page. The works of art are a joy to look at, but I often wonder how practical they are to maintain.
The first web pages I put on the public Internet were also of the simplest formatting. Of course, they were all about books and reading. I found a couple of examples on the Wayback Machine, including a page on my favorite science fiction writers of the time (circa 2003) and an FAQ on my reading list. (Naturally, the list of books I’ve read since 1996 was one of the first things I put on the web.)
An FAQ from my website, circa 2003.My first experience with the Internet, outside the walled garden of AOL, was in 1994 when I started with my company. That was more than 30 years ago, and it occurs to me that there are people reading this piece who were not alive at the time and have no frame of reference to those early days. Reddit might look antiquated from that perspective, but I recall fondly the joys of Usenet, especially its simple, plaintext look-and-feel. I enjoy browsing sites like textfiles.com now and then as a form of digital nostalgia, but also as a reminder that writing on the Internet does not have to be as complex as we make it.
Of course, once one website gets a facelift, others follow, each seeking to get the most possible attention in a world where free time and attention are at a premium. I am no different in this regard. While I wouldn’t consider my website a trendsetter in terms of style, neither is it the basic HTML formatting of the early Internet. As much as I’d like it to be, I don’t think most readers these days would tolerate that. We’ve been trained to expect more from style, even as we expect less from content.
Post Scripts
I wrote two drafts of this post. I’m not particularly pleased with either, but whatever you think of what I finally published, it is better than the first draft. This is what happens when I try to post every day and lose some of my lead time to laziness and life in general. On the other hand, it helps me better understand the pressure a sportswriter is under to get a column out or to write an original summary of a ball game 162 times a season.Did you enjoy this post?
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