Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Category: general

  • All the stuff on my desk, 2020 edition

    I did this back in 2013, so maybe it’s time for an update. An Anthro desk, 60-inch wide, “fog” color. Anthro no longer exists, so I’m not sure if they still make them. 2020 MacBook Pro 16-inch (the last Intel one). Lenovo Thinkpad – I don’t remember the number, but about two years old (work…

  • Done editing

    I think I finished editing and republishing old entries yesterday. The grand total is that I have 1,362 posts, with a word count of 1,059,000 or so words. I’m finding that this is big enough that it cripples either of the main SEO plugins for WordPress. That would be a problem if I was trying…

  • 2020 summary

    So, 2020. We can all go on forever talking about the horrors of the year: the pandemic, the economy, the job market, politics, and everything else. I don’t want to get into it. I can’t get into it. Let me try to scrape together an update like I did last year and stick to my…

  • Still editing

    I mentioned a few days ago that I’d pulled every entry on here and was slowly adding them back. That’s basically all I’ve been doing for the last several days. I had close to 1600 entries before starting this crusade. I’m down to about 100 in the queue, although I wouldn’t mind doing some more…

  • 2020 Dreams

    So, about this year’s dreams. Before 2020 went completely sideways, my friend Joel died. After that, he started showing up in my dreams, a lot. Like, an unhealthy amount. The dreams were nothing abnormal or psychotic; it either involved running into him at a party, or the company we used to work for somehow got…

  • Christmas, blogging

    Pretty low-key Christmas here. Three different Zoom calls, which were okay, but when you spend ten hours a day in Zoom calls, that can be problematic. No presents or anything. Sarah made this gigantic chunk of prime rib, and we watched the original movie Fargo. The giant chunk of meat may be my final coda on…

  • NEW YEAR NEW THEME

    So here’s how behind I am: this site has been running the WordPress Twenty Eleven theme since 2012 or so. Now that the Twenty Twenty-One theme has just shipped, I decided to upgrade to the Twenty Twenty theme. A few features and differences: A lot more space and readability, with better typography (I think) Much…

  • Book layouts in Apple Pages

    I do my book layouts in Apple Pages. Yes, I should be using InDesign. No, I don’t want to pay $35/month for something I use once a year. Apple Pages worked okay for layouts until version 5.0 came out in 2013, when they tried making the OSX and iOS versions have parity with each other,…

  • Vacation, CDs, Drones, Etc

    I still have a new book out. https://amzn.to/3r4c2KG I am on vacation from writing for a bit. I don’t want to get into the next thing, and want to take some time off. But I am also going stir crazy not writing every day, and the last time I took more than a few weeks…

  • Day 768

    I think it’s actually like day 223 or something, I don’t know. I have lost track. 768 and 863 are magic numbers to me. I think I explained this before a long time ago, probably in the now-dead glossary. When I worked at Montgomery Ward in high school, I sold paint. Wards actually had really…