🎮 I played through through Celeste this week. I really enjoyed the challenge until the last couple levels, when I had to turn Assist Mode on to get through them. I am glad I made it up to the top of the mountain, no matter how I got there.

I found out about plaintextsports.com from a Daring Fireball post. The site’s Twitter account describes it thusly:

Live sports scores, play-by-play and boxscores, in plain text. No ads, no tracking, no loading.

I love it. It is fast and no-nonsense. Clicking on the box scores loads a page full of stats for each game. There is even a “hidden” page that lets you follow all the teams in certain cities or regions. It is laid out perfectly for smartphones. The only drawback is that you can’t make its tables a little wider on tablet or desktop browsers.

I can’t wait for baseball season to start so I can use this site for a sport I follow.

One of my old websites is #2 on Hacker News right now.

Luke Broadwater and Amelia Nierenberg report in The New York Times:

After losing an hour of sleep over the weekend, members of the United States Senate returned to the Capitol this week a bit groggy and in a mood to put an end to all this frustrating clock-changing.

So on Tuesday, with almost no warning and no debate, the Senate unanimously passed legislation to do away with the biannual springing forward and falling back that most Americans have come to despise, in favor of making daylight saving time permanent. The bill’s fate in the House was not immediately clear, but if the legislation were to pass there and be signed by President Biden, it would take effect in November 2023.

I am trying not to get my hopes up, but I would love it if we stopped changing the clocks twice each year.

I never really cared about it until I had kids. I learned the hard way that messing with their sleep schedule makes kids crazy, and the effect can last for weeks. Now changing the clicks is a twice-yearly curse.

I would prefer Daylight Saving Time year-round. Having sunlight in the early evening is of far greater value to me than having the sun rise earlier.

⚾️ I’m watching the Red Sox/Twins opening Spring Training game. I’m happy that baseball is back! Instead of following the Sox, I may watch the MLB free game of the day and jump around the league this year. It will be interesting to see how the new universal designated hitter rule plays out.

🍀 We are having a St. Patrick’s Day dinner tonight. I put the corned beef in the slow cooker and got the potatoes ready for roasting later. I’m even going to cook cabbage for the first time. I plan to sauté it, and hope it turns out well.

I want to help my daughter do a science fair project and create a fancy 3-fold poster for her elementary school’s science fair next month. I like the idea of making oobleck (a.k.a. “slime”) with cornstarch and water and doing some simple experiments with it. I think it would be a lot of fun. I wonder if it is too basic for fourth grade, but I expect it would be OK. I think that learning the format of creating an experiment and presenting it in poster form is a lot more important than the impressiveness of the experiment.

Kevin Draper reports for The New York Times that Tom Brady is rescinding his retirement announcement from only eight weeks ago:

Brady, the 44-year-old quarterback who has won the Super Bowl seven times, wrote on his social media accounts Sunday evening that he would return to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to play his 23rd N.F.L. season.

I can only admire Tom Brady’s gumption here. His numbers last season were so good that his retirement seemed unnecessary, despite his age. I wonder if he can win another Super Bowl ring. It he does, I wonder if he would really retire right afterward, or if he would keep pushing forward until he can’t compete at all anymore.

My daughter had a book fair at school today. She was so thrilled about it that she told me about it many times over the weekend before it happened, and several times today after it happened. She proudly showed my wife and me the books and the fancy pencils and erasers she bought there today. It is wonderful how much she loves to read and to write.

I always loved book fairs in elementary school, too. It was fun, as a kid, to get a chance to shop with real money and actually make buying decisions. I’m happy my daughter gets the same opportunity.

My son is starting to get interested in ScratchJr on his iPad. It is a visual programming environment for kids. It seems like a good way for kids to learn programming. I set him up with it on Saturday and tried to help him get started yesterday. So far his favorite part is the image editor, which of course is the non-programming part. He has been drawing and coloring with it most of the time. Tonight he showed me one of the animations he made with ScratchJr. Now I know he is interested in the programming part, too. Tonight he demanded I get him ScatchJr’s big brother: Scratch, which is just a web app. I look forward to seeing what he thinks of it.

I got a chance to try Universal Control tonight. It is pretty cool! I think it will come in handy sometimes, when I want to type on my iPad without having to get my BlueTooth keyboard.

I have not had much interesting to say lately. I have been doing boring things like preparing my taxes and watching way more TV than usual. I hope to get out of my creative slump soon.

Judging by the weather—wind, cold, snow, sleet, hail, and rain—it is the last gasp of winter here in New Jersey. All I have wanted to do is sit under a blanket and watch TV.

I play chess on Chess.com, thanks to a challenge request from Andrew Canion a while back. We play “1 Day” games, which are essentially correspondence chess. It is great fun playing against Andrew, but I don’t get to play with him in real time because we live on different sides of the planet. To see if I can beat an opponent—who is not one of my kids—in real time, I have played a number of blitz games, which are 10-minute games. Unfortunately, I always lose them badly or lose on time. The clock stresses me out, which makes the games not much fun at all.

It did not occur to me before today that I could start such a “1 Day” game against a random opponent on Chess.com just as easily as I could start a blitz game. I did so tonight, and now I have another long, slow game going. I am happy to have found another way to play chess against people at my level that won’t stress me out.

Jason Snell, on Six Colors, shared some interesting information about Apple’s Major League Baseball announcement on Tuesday :

Though NBCUniversal’s Peacock is rumored to be picking up ESPN’s old package for Monday and Wednesday night games, what Apple is doing is an entirely new license from Major League Baseball, containing three separate products…

He goes on to provide details about MLB Big Inning, linear and on-demand archival content, and Friday Night Baseball, which run the gamut from normal televised baseball to something akin to the NFL Red Zone.

As a lapsed baseball fan who happens to be an Apple One subscriber—mostly for the iCloud storage—I am excited about this. I bailed on my annual MLB At Bat subscription in 2020, due in large part to not having enough time to watch baseball games. I have been considering subscribing again this year, once the baseball season starts, but I am still not sure it is worth the money if I’m not going to watch a ton of games. Apple’s offerings, which I already pay for, may be just the right amount of baseball for me.

🎮 I bought 992 games today from Itch.io: the Bundle for Ukraine. Now my backlog is over 1,000. 😅 I (selfishly) wanted to pick up cross-platform, DRM-free versions of Celeste and Baba Is You for cheap. The rest is gravy.

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is one of the disappointments in my Nintendo Switch collection. I had hoped it would bring me the same joy that Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros. did in the past. Instead, I found it punishingly difficult, due to devilishly positioned enemies and a physics engine tailored to make the characters slip off platforms all the time. (Don’t even get me started about the Ghost Houses.) It seems to have been made for players who are so good at Mario games that they are absolutely sick of them and are interested only in an insane challenge.

The developers must have known it was too difficult, because they added two “easy-mode” characters and an option to have Luigi show a sample run of any level and allow you to skip it at the end. Despite these aides, on my first play-though, I stalled out in the middle—I literally could not get through the next level, whichever path I took—and gave it up for a couple years.

Last week, I was thinking about how poorly I fared at New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe. I wondered it the reason I found it so difficult was that my Mario skills had atrophied. To test that, I played through Super Mario World, which I have not played in about 15 years. I was able to blow right through it (the Star World levels notwithstanding), so I don’t think my Mario skills are entirely the problem. I expected Super Mario World-level difficulty, but New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is a much harder game.

A few days ago I decided I was up for the challenge again, and would play and finish New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe this time, hell or high water. I would not try to collect the three star coins in each level. I would not try hard to find the game’s plentiful secrets. I would even play as the second-easiest character, Toadette, the whole time and use Luigi’s sample runs to skip levels. I am not trying to collect star coins or trying hard to find secrets; I am simply trying to reach the end of each level.

Even with this plan, I have not yet finished it. I am almost at Peach’s castle, which is the last set of levels. I am glad that I finally discovered many of the colorful, creative, and clever bits that the game designers put into the game; in total, however, they fail to delight me. I’m sure that New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is a good game, but it is not a good game for me. I am not sure I will ever play the game again after I beat it.

Since watching the Apple announcement today and learning about the Mac Studio, I have never been happier that I did not wait for a more powerful Mac mini before I bought mine. The Mac Studio is more computer than I need and is out of my price range (for a desktop at least). I am thrilled that it exists for other people to use, and will happily listen to the pundits talk about for the rest of the month. For myself, though, the M1 Mac mini is more than enough, and the one I bought cost about $800 less than the least expensive Mac Studio.

The M1-based iPad Air is more relevant to me. I would love to hand off my current generation 4 iPad Air to my daughter and buy the new one for myself. I don’t need the performance for much, but for photo editing it will be a leap forward. I don’t think my daughter would ever go for this plan, though; my iPad Air is blue, not pink. I should have bought a neutral color.

I am excited to see what new Macs Apple announces tomorrow. I would love for there to be a new MacBook that follows the design language of the iPad Air, with flat sides, rounded corners, and anodized aluminum shells in several different colors. Ever since I got the generation 4 iPad Air I have wanted a MacBook that looks a little like two of them sandwiched together. For a little while longer I can dream that one will be unveiled tomorrow or later this year.

I am thankful for sun, warm weather, and my home office loudspeakers this morning. It’s going to be a good day.

🍴 My wife and I ordered Indian food tonight. That may be a non-event to most people, but for us it was a revolution. My wife never tried it before. I hadn’t had any since before she and I got married. We absolutely loved it and are still excited about it.

My wife was in a car collision this morning. She was uninjured but was understandably shaken up. I cancelled my morning meetings to go help her. Most of my help consisted of coordinating the tow truck and the body shop.

While this was happening, my son fell out of his chair at preschool, hurt his back, and was given an ice pack, and my daughter was sent to the school nurse on account of her chapped hands, which were bleeding.

My whole day blew up, but it was fine. My wife and kids are fine. The car is damaged and we won’t drive it until it gets fixed, but it will be fixed someday this month. I didn’t get all my work done today, but my coworkers understand that sometimes things don’t work out the way they are planned.

I gave a coworker some advice for giving effective presentations today. I told her some things worth remembering:

1. You are the star of your presentation, not your slide deck.
2. Structure the presentation around ideas rather than facts.
3. Make the presentation structure seem simple and obvious to the audience. One thing should always lead to the next.
4. It is better to present fewer concepts well than it is to present more concepts poorly.
5. Incorporate narrative into your presentations if you can. People love stories and are more likely to remember concepts that are tied to stories and anecdotes better than those that are not.
6. At the beginning of your talk, convince the audience members why they should care about what you are telling them. If they care, they are more likely to listen to what you have to say.
7. A slide deck should not be a reference book. If you want to produce reference material for your audience, create a handout—which most likely should not be in the form of a slide deck—and give that to your audience during the presentation.
8. Each slide should be simple enough for the audience to understand it in a couple seconds. You don’t want audience members to be reading your slides when they should be listening to you talk.
9. Slides should contain no more than six items. The human mind can process up to six items incredibly quickly; it takes much longer to process seven or more.
10. Break up long lists into multiple slides.
11. Avoid making lists of bullet points. Instead, space out your items in an eye-pleasing grid (no more complex than two-by-three) and use meaningful icons for each item.
12. Full-bleed images and single, short sentences centered on an otherwise blank slide can be used to highlight important points and stimulate visual interest in the audience.
13. You are not going to read your slides while you present. Therefore, to keep on track during the presentation, write (and later refer to) speaker notes for each slide that cover your main points.
14. Rehearse the presentation until you can perform it by only glancing at your speaker notes.
15. Manage the clock well. Don’t let asides or questions from the audience take up so much time that you cannot cover all your material or properly wrap up at the end.
16. The best way to project confidence when hit with an unexpected audience question is to smile, speak slowly, and look toward your co-presenters for help.

My little corner of Micro.blog has not had much to say about the invasion of Ukraine. This is probably a good thing, because it provides me a respite from grim news and unsubstantiated reports from the front lines. If I still had a Twitter timeline to scroll through, I’m certain that it would be full of performative, meaningless platitudes¹, and strident back-and-forth arguments from people who (like me) have no bearing on the outcome of the conflict about what should be done about it.

All I can say right now is that the war is very upsetting to me and the news and commentary about it over the past two weeks (starting before the invasion) have been driving me crazy. Reading news reports and scrolling through social media has been especially disquieting to me. I know not everything I see is true. A lot of it is likely to be propaganda from one side of the conflict or the other. The internet is the best disinformation vehicle the world has ever created, and it is not only being used by Russia, it’s being used by Ukraine and everyone else, too. Ukraine may not be doing as well in this war as some of the video clips I have seen would lead me to believe.

Ukrainians are fighting a just war against an invading force, which makes taking sides in the conflict morally simple. Ukraine clearly does not deserve Putin’s incursion, and has put up a brave and savvy fight so far against it. It is easy to get caught up in how exciting and seemingly effective their defiance is, and to cheer them on in their defense of their democracy. But war is not an action movie. That it started already makes it a tragedy, and no matter the outcome it will end as an even greater one. The scrappy, virtuous underdogs may lose the fight. Their allies’ aide may be insufficient. Their charismatic leader may be killed. The two sides may broker a peace after heavy losses, and leave nothing meaningful resolved. Whatever the outcome is, I think we are all the worse for it.

Recently, I converted all of my (very old) academic writing from outdated document formats (WordStar and Microsoft Word 6) to more future-proof formats: either Markdown or OpenDocument format (.odt). While I did not re-read every essay I ever wrote for school during this process, I did notice something in my files that surprised me: From my junior year of high school to my final semester of grad school, I created outlines—full sentence outlines¹—for all of my papers that were over a few pages in length. I had forgotten that I used that type of outline for more than two important projects in my academic career: my first English thesis project and my last.

My first English thesis project, wherein I learned about the sentence outline

I was first taught (i.e., forced to use) a sentence outline in high school. It was a requirement of my grade 10 English thesis project, which was a 10-page research and literary criticism paper. At the time, I understood how to create high-level outlines pretty well, but could not understand why I would create an outline that contained full sentences of the essay I was trying to write. I figured that if I could write a sentence outline for an essay, I could just as easily (or more easily) write the essay itself. In grade 10, that is precisely what I did: I wrote the essay and then split apart every paragraph and every sentence into a hierarchical outline. In doing so, I learned almost nothing.

My last English thesis project, wherein I mastered the sentence outline

For my final English thesis project, my senior honors thesis in English at Brandeis University, I resorted to a sentence outline to solve my writer’s block. It was a year-long, independent study project, and my thesis advisor—who mostly told me that despite my anxiety I was doing fine—was not terribly helpful or available. Understandably, I lacked direction. I had no idea how to write a big, scary, and academically significant 80-100 page essay. When I sat down to write, I would either produce a jumbled mess of thoughts and quotations that did not fit together, or I would compose a coherent paragraph that I could not connect to anything else I wrote. As my senior year went by, I felt as if I was falling further and further behind my brilliant, thesis-writing peers. Counterintuitively (or understandably, depending on how you look at it), this feeling of dread led me to procrastinate instead of write.

In the early spring, I realized that if I created an outline, I could work on my big, scary thesis essay without actually writing it. To that end, I split the work that had been going nowhere into two Word documents: (1) a simple, high-level outline that consisted of just a few headings at the start; and (2) an unorganized junk drawer of ideas and quotations from my source material. Outlining quickly became a productive form of procrastination for me. Instead of writing my essay, I would pluck out ideas from my junk-drawer document and drop them into the outline. From there, I would change these ideas, move them around, flesh them out, add to them, or delete them, all without committing to their precise wording or location. Because these ideas were all sentences or block quotes, my outline necessarily became a sentence outline.

Using keyboard shortcuts I no longer remember, I collapsed sections and paragraphs of my thesis outline and moved them up and down to organize my ideas, and I shifted individual sentences up and down to make my arguments clearer and easier to understand. Because I was avoiding the writing phase of my project, I avoided gluing my sentences together with logical-, narrative-, or stylistic flow until I felt sure they were in the right place in the document and in the right order in their paragraph. Doing so took some time to get used to, but granted me a feeling of tremendous freedom as I worked out the essay’s high-level structure and the fleshed out the arguments I was advancing within it.

I didn’t realize until I was finalizing my thesis—when my outline was a 100-page outline full of section headings, topic sentences, and body sentences organized into paragraph-level nodes—that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do. I had organized my research and my findings in a format that was incredibly flexible, and I was constantly revising it and shaping it into something coherent. By accident, I had finally learned why a sentence outline is useful: It explodes an essay into individual thoughts that are physically separate² and logically atomic³. Doing so makes it easier to evaluate each one independently and—with a good word processor—to quickly group, ungroup, reorder, and move them into place.

In the end, I never wrote my thesis paper. Instead, over the course of a few months, I wrote a sentence outline. I converted it to a manuscript only a day or two before I turned in the final draft. My only edits to it, in manuscript form, were related to applying Word styles to the various paragraphs and adding a title page. The final draft must have been pretty good because it was awarded the Doris Brewer Cohen Award for best senior honors undergraduate thesis in the humanities at Brandeis University.

In grad school and beyond

I went to business school after college, and did not have to write nearly as many long papers to earn my M.B.A. as I did to earn my undergraduate English degree. Despite the small number of major papers I wrote, and despite not remembering the writing process I followed for them, I discovered that I wrote sentence outlines for each one.

After grad school, almost all of my long-form writing has been technical writing for work. While I do not have any old drafts lying around, I recall using outlines extensively to plan and structure my work, but I never again used sentence outlines to draft and perfect it. One reason for that may be that I used different software to write with: mostly plaintext editors, rarely Word (not until I had a first draft nearly completed), and never a dedicated outliner like OmniOutliner. Another reason is that much of my technical writing had to fit into pre-existing document templates that already consisted of many short sections laid out in a specific, required order.

After discovering my longer-than-remembered history of using sentence outlines, and reminiscing about the senior honors thesis project on which I mastered the use of them, I now wonder if I should go back to using them for my larger writing projects.