Daniel Jalkut's reflections on everyday life.
My 17-year-old son is a High School senior, and he's shopping for colleges. I joke with him all the time about going somewhere nearby. "Hey, this school looks good!" I say, about a school scarcely two miles away. We happen to live in the Boston suburbs, where every school "looks good" through a national, or even international lens. I say this kind of thing a lot. I know he wants some distance from…
I've been an active runner for a long time. As I explained a few years ago in My Running Habit , I never ran long distances as a kid, but eased into increasingly longer runs as an adult. Now I typically run over 20 miles every week. It keeps me somewhat sane, and even more than somewhat physically fit. Something I consistently hear from new runners is how they wish they could be enthusiastic about…
I was digging through old files, and found the essay I wrote when I was applying for admission to UC Santa Cruz. I was a student at Cabrillo College, a community college in the area. I had been studying for around 3 years after dropping out of high school at the age of 15. I didn't look to anybody for advice about writing college essays. Nobody proofread it. I cringe at some of the writing, but…
If you're anything like me, you probably have some amount of trouble keeping up with your tasks. I usually fluctuate between being "moderately on top of things" and "OMG I am so not on top of things" and "I'm completely overwhelmed and can't do anything." For many years I have used OmniFocus to manage my tasks, which has been a great help. Just getting everything I have to do in one place is the…
I'm a parent of elementary school kids, aged 6 and 9. I volunteer in many aspects of my kids' school, but among the most rewarding of these experiences have been the times I've volunteered for our school's Hour of Code event. Lack of diversity in the tech industry is a systemic problem and nobody has yet figured out how to solve it. But events like Hour of Code seem to be doing a good job fighting…
Many women are chiming in for #MeToo, to raise awareness about the common experience of being sexually assaulted or harassed. It drives home to me how easy it is for myself and other men to remain oblivious about the problem. Obviously, boys and men are also victims of assault and harassment, but the sheer number of women who are speaking out drives home the disparity. This is not OK.
My family and I went apple picking today. I grew up in California, and apple picking was not a part of my culture. California is a very agricultural state, but there aren't many apple orchards. In retrospect, I don't know why I didn't do more strawberry picking, or for that matter artichoke picking as a kid, but "pick your own" was never a big part of my childhood. When I moved to Massachusetts in…
I've been active politically for my entire adult life. I have voted in every Presidential election, usually for the Democratic candidate, and always for a candidate who reflected my hopes and aspirations for the country. Clinton in 1996. Nader in 2000 (in California, for what it's worth). Kerry in 2004. Obama twice, and finally, in 2016, for Hillary Clinton. Yet despite, or in part because of my…
I spent the past week in San Francisco, not attending Apple's WWDC , but rather basking in the periphery of it. I attended Jessie Char's Layers conference, and spent the rest of my week being projected like a pinball, sometimes slowly, sometimes at enormous speed, between the various social attractions that dot the South of Market landscape this time of year. On Thursday, I finally had the…
If you're not familiar with the podcast Song Exploder , I encourage you to check it out. In it, musicians dissect their own music, digging into the nuances of instrumentation, inspiration, etc. Last night I heard a fully formed episode, in my dreams, of another podcast called "Song Imploder." In contrast to Song Exploder, the challenge in this amazing, imaginary podcast is for a musician to piece…
Catching up with the Roderick on the Line podcast, episode 187 includes a discussion of the temperament of musical instruments. In particular of the piano, but also a nod by John Roderick to some B-string-flattening guitar folklore espoused by Eddie Van Halen. In my travels, it has become clear that most ordinary people do not understand what it means for an instrument to be tempered. Anybody with…
I've described my running habit before, wherein I run "every other day," more or less without fail. Today Boston was hit with a significant snow storm. Schools are shut down. The city is blanketed in white. It's a sight to behold. And it's my running day. That's just how I roll!
I finally got around to reading the widely-celebrated New Yorker article about Megan Phelps-Roper and her departure from the Westboro Baptist Church , a hate group based in Topeka, Kansas. The article is a fascinating profile of a young woman who transitioned from a committed, utterly brainwashed member of the "church," to an empathetic, thoughtful member of society at large. It's a valuable…
I was a sprinter as a kid: I counted myself among the fastest runners in my grade-school classes, and would routinely challenge friends to ad hoc dashes across arbitrary stretches of playground grass or asphalt. As much as I enjoyed pushing my body to its limits for these explosive, 30-second jaunts, the idea of running any longer distance filled me, as it did most kids my age, with utter dread.…
I like pizza. Shocking, isn't it? Like many people, I have enjoyed the delicious combination of dough, sauce, and cheese since I was a kid. For a long time I dreamed about making my own pizza at home, but it wasn't until I was around 30 that I finally decided to give it a try. My first attempt was disappointing to say the least. The crust was baked hard like a cracker and was difficult to chew.…
I was moved to write a Yelp review for a particularly good Dunkin' Donuts (767 Cromwell Avenue, Rocky Hill, CT). It's not normal to feel moved to review a more-or-less gross fast food place, so I thought I'd keep the review here for posterity. Stopped here unexpectedly to give a break to a car-sick-feeling 6-year-old on a road trip. The 6-year-old sickling and his 2-year-old brother marched in to…
For most of my life, I have borrowed hours from the late night and early morning, paying off the debt by either sleeping lavishly through the day, or coping with the zombie-making effects of sleep deprivation. Lured in by the (probably false) promise that endless, quiet hours of darkness and solitude will pay dividends in productivity gains, I have often struggled to complete "just one more thing"…
A perfect day in Brooklyn.
Taking a stand on new TSA policies that require passengers to choose between x-ray body scans or invasive pat-downs involving genital contact:
Aol has wasted no time in rebranding their new property.
I'm listening to the audiobook of Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story , set in an approximate dystopian future where, among other things, youth lingo has evolved even further along its current trajectory towards what Wikipedia classifies as SMS language . OMG, you don't know what SMS language is? These are the short initialisms that have become so popular especially among youth to minimize…
We are pretty lucky here in Ditmas Park to have access to several nice restaurants, some of which double as cafes. But there is a relative void of businesses going all-out after the cafe niche. On my way to the supermarket this evening I noticed a "soft launch" for a business which seems aimed at filling that void: Qathra Cafe. Looks like they'll be offering coffee, espresso drinks, and pastries…