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  • Playing 80 Days as a New Yearโ€™s Eve family game. ๐ŸŽฎ

    โ†’ 7:23 PM, Dec 31
  • Working some more on the text adventure game with the 10 y.o. Despite my explicit instructions that we are in fix-bugs-and-ship-it mode, she is undeterred and continues to add features. ๐Ÿ˜‚

    โ†’ 2:47 PM, Dec 29
  • My daughter and I have been writing a text adventure game for the ten-year-old set over the break. It’s close to being ready for beta testing. Lots of bad jokes.

    โ†’ 3:35 PM, Dec 28
  • Currently reading: A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman ๐Ÿ“š

    โ†’ 7:39 PM, Dec 19
  • Got a nice email from a fifth grader telling me that her class is using my map of slavery and that the map was wrong to label Maine as part of Massachusetts. So I got a chance to write back commending her curiosity and attention to detail, and explaining the Missouri Compromise.

    โ†’ 10:20 AM, Dec 14
  • Finished reading: The Course of Godโ€™s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America by Philippa Koch ๐Ÿ“š

    โ†’ 11:59 AM, Dec 11
  • I love the idea of character-based playlists for the TV show Halt and Catch Fire. Here’s one for Joe MacMillan, for example.

    โ†’ 11:30 AM, Dec 11
  • Currently reading: The Resurrection of Johnny Cash by Graeme Thomson ๐Ÿ“š

    โ†’ 12:30 PM, Dec 10
  • Someone recently complained on GitHub, “You haven’t updated this package in three years.” What they should have said was, “You wrote software that works without a bug for three years.”

    โ†’ 9:08 AM, Oct 8
  • I had no idea you could get a document camera for anything [approaching](https://www.ipevo.com/products/vz-r by) a reasonable price. This could be a game changer for online teaching or even just meetings. To be considered โ€ฆ

    โ†’ 5:30 PM, Sep 26
  • Currently reading: History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi ๐Ÿ“š

    โ†’ 5:09 PM, Sep 26
  • No one cares about reproducible research (including me) until they need to run some research scripts from a couple years ago (including me).

    โ†’ 1:40 PM, Sep 15
  • Parts of the DOI/CrossRef system are amazing. The XML responses in email … less so.

    โ†’ 11:05 AM, Sep 4
  • I finished a longer (12K words) piece of writing yesterday and a shorter (2K words) one today. A combination of deadlines and children in school provided both motivation and opportunity.

    โ†’ 7:17 PM, Sep 2
  • RRCHNM has cleaned up its back catalog of video on YouTube. There’s a lot of good history here.

    โ†’ 3:24 PM, Aug 30
  • โœ‰๏ธ Working on It #11: The Stack.

    โ†’ 5:55 PM, Aug 29
  • Ted Gioia designs and builds his home library.

    โ†’ 6:27 PM, Aug 24
  • Earlier this year I got myself a proper stereo. My family had stereo equipment like this when I was growing up, and I listened to lots of music that way. Even with a smart speaker and streaming in the house, I hardly ever listened to music. Now we listen to a lot more.

    โ†’ 7:24 PM, Aug 22
  • The kindergartner, the fifth grader, and the two professors are all packed up for the start of school tomorrow. Letโ€™s hope this goes well.

    โ†’ 7:12 PM, Aug 22
  • A grandfather clock my daughter made out of legos.

    โ†’ 2:25 PM, Aug 20
  • I’m very pleased with the Obsidian iOS app, which lets me get away from iCloud syncing and lets me add notes while not at my computer.

    โ†’ 10:37 AM, Aug 12
  • Currently reading: Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith (Spiritual Lives) by Elesha J. Coffman ๐Ÿ“š

    โ†’ 9:46 AM, Aug 7
  • Delighted to see my friend Sam Lebovic’s new book available for pre-order: A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization. That’s one heckuva cover.

    โ†’ 12:19 PM, Aug 5
  • I left one meeting today by saying I had to go to my next appointment. My next appointment was eating ice cream cones with my kids on the deck.

    โ†’ 6:31 PM, Aug 4
  • Right now I’m writing a crawler that discovers all the digitized text-based sources in the Library of Congress’s sources. I really like writing it in Go: software both simpler and more solid than anything I’ve written in other languages. All the code will land in this repository.

    โ†’ 1:13 PM, Jul 2
  • This summer and fall I’m working with the amazing and fun folks at LC Labs on a project called Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud. I’m extending America’s Public Bible to find biblical quotations across the Library of Congress’s digital collections.

    • Explanation from Library of Congress

    • Story about the project from the Wall Street Journal

    โ†’ 1:10 PM, Jul 2
  • I’ve said it elsewhere, but probably not here on Micro.blog:

    I’m very glad that Jason Heppler (@jaheppler) has joined RRCHNM as a developer-scholar. He’s going to do great things; we’re going to do great things.

    Here’s the announcement, but check out Jason’s work directly.

    โ†’ 1:06 PM, Jul 2
  • Currently reading: The Human Factor by Graham Greene ๐Ÿ“š

    โ†’ 1:45 PM, May 13
  • Currently reading: The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton.๐Ÿ“š

    โ†’ 5:47 PM, Apr 1
  • Currently reading: To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party by Heather Cox Richardson. ๐Ÿ“š

    โ†’ 8:24 PM, Mar 30
  • Not as exciting as the title would indicate.

    And definitely not exciting once you log in.

    โ†’ 6:21 PM, Mar 29
  • Current status: Johnny Cash, โ€œThe Beast in Me.โ€

    โ†’ 1:52 PM, Mar 28
  • Currently reading: Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy by K. Healan Gaston. ๐Ÿ“š

    โ†’ 6:26 PM, Mar 21
  • โ€ฆ until it doesnโ€™t.

    โ†’ 8:04 PM, Feb 24
  • It works โ€ฆ

    โ†’ 8:04 PM, Feb 24
  • In 2017, I changed the topic of my digital methods class to Reconstruction. Twenty days before that class meets this year, a mob organized on social media flying the Confederate battle flag stormed the Capitol while a Southern senator proposed an Electoral Commission.

    โ†’ 9:20 PM, Jan 25
  • My internal monologue upon assigning the Gospel of Mark:

    “Hmm. Should I scan this reading for the students?”

    “The Gospel of Mark might be the most widely distributed text in the history of humanity. I think they can find themselves a copy.”

    “Saves time, and also educational.”

    โ†’ 5:31 PM, Jan 23
  • I’m teaching The Global History of Christianity this semester. It is far and away my favorite course to teach, even though I feel humbledโ€”and almost crushedโ€”by the weight of the subject.

    โ†’ 5:24 PM, Jan 23
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