about.

stuff that interests me

tech

most things that are Apple ((For the record: I’ve owned noth­ing but Apple com­put­ers since the used Apple IIe my dad bought around 1989. Four years later I bought myself a Performa 560. In other words: I did­n’t jump on this band­wagon after it was cool, and I never jumped ship. I used OS 7.5 and I liked it.)), Areca SAS RAID arrays, SSDs, Thunderbolt, and other things that mean I don’t have to wait for files to trans­fer; WordPress, clean CSS (which is to say I admire it — my own endeavor to become a CSS ninja is a work-in-progress), big high-res mon­i­tors, cloud-based ser­vices and stor­age, Keynote, Logitech mice and keyboards

design

typog­ra­phy, tex­tures, hor­i­zon­tal lines, lower-case, Helvetica (some­times)

sports

base­ball, the Dodgers, foot­ball, the Bears (sorry… I don’t say “da Bears” since I’m not a fat, mus­ta­chioed man from Chicago), Kirk Gibson, the Lakers (if I have energy to fol­low the NBA), hot dogs, qual­ity pitch­ing and slick defense

grammar & punctuation

I’m stub­born about the fol­low­ing things. You have the right to dis­agree, but you’re wrong. (And I can prove it.)

• It’s fine to split an infini­tive. ((The Chicago Manual of Style says so. And Merriam-Webster says the objec­tion to the split infini­tive has never had a ratio­nal basis. (see also: Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994), pp. 867–868.) ))
• Unless you’re writ­ing a very for­mal doc­u­ment, con­trac­tions are just fine. (And few peo­ple ever write doc­u­ments that for­mal.) ((See Chicago Manual of Style sec­tion 5.103: Most types of writ­ing ben­e­fit from the use of con­trac­tions. If used thought­fully, con­trac­tions in prose sound nat­ural and relaxed and make read­ing more enjoy­able. (see also: Modern American Usage, 2nd ed. by Brian A. Garner (2003), Oxford University Press, p. 194.) ))
• The Oxford comma is cor­rect. ((The MLA, Chicago Manual of Style, and many oth­ers back me up on this, but I need no other ref­er­ence than Strunk & White: In a series of three or more terms with a sin­gle con­junc­tion, use a comma after each term except the last. (Of course, that’s from The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White (2005), Penguin Press, p. 3.) ))
• Thou shalt not type two spaces after a period. Ever. Exclamation point. ((Your high school typ­ing teacher was wrong. Get over it. Don’t believe me? The style man­u­als are unan­i­mous on this one (MLA, APA, AP, etc.), but I like the sim­ple ele­gance of the Chicago Manual of Style (2003 edi­tion, p. 61): 2.12 A sin­gle char­ac­ter space, not two spaces, should be left after peri­ods at the ends of sen­tences (both in man­u­script and in final, pub­lished form). And flip to p. 243: 6.11 In type­set mat­ter, one space, not two (in other words, a reg­u­lar word space), fol­lows any mark of punc­tu­a­tion that ends a sen­tence, whether a period, a colon, a ques­tion mark, an excla­ma­tion point, or clos­ing quo­ta­tion marks. And on that same page: 6.13 A period marks the end of a declar­a­tive or an imper­a­tive sen­tence. It is fol­lowed by a sin­gle space. That should be enough proof, but if you require an expla­na­tion, Farhad Manjoo’s excel­lent 2011 essay on the topic is required reading.))