Not sure what I expected less today: To explain the concept of death to my kid or for my kid to grasp the concept well enough to burst into tears.

Listening to public Swiss radio (as I do) and got chills when I heard a new, prerecorded gov’t COVID-19 safety message played before the hourly news update. Felt like I was in disaster fiction.

Perk of having ed tech degree/experience in the era of COVID-19: I’m currently walking my mom through Zoom to allow for possibility of her offering distance piano lessons.

Was there a moral panic about radio? My kid is enjoying podcasts, and while parent-me feels like that’s somehow better than TV, tech researcher me is wondering about history.

TIL that if you don’t keep an e-bike adequately charged, all of that fancy-but-heavy pedal assist equipment is as much of a liability for your commute as it usually is an asset.

Trying to collect tweets from a very-new account, but advanced search with “from:” doesn’t seem to work. Has anyone ever had this happen before?

Is there a word for “the uncanny valley” but for British actors doing American accents (and, presumably, vice versa)?

35 GB of data is a lot to begin with, but when it’s 35 GB of CSVs? That’s when it starts to really register.

If Charles Xavier is looking for a copy editor, I’m pretty sure my mutant power is noticing unnecessary spaces between words in a manuscript.

I have been a fan of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a while, but I’m just now discovering how useful it can be for internet research 😍😍😍

Despite a really intense week (important work meetings, closing on a house), the 30 minutes where we thought we’d lost the kid’s beloved stuffed animal easily takes 1st place for stress level.

Sometimes I don’t realize how excited I am about a study until I write the conference proposal for it… which then just makes me more nervous about getting accepted.

The only bad thing about having volunteered to maintain the Global Mormon Studies website is that every time I update the program for the 2020 conference, I am increasingly disappointed that I didn’t have anything to submit myself.

Preparing a talk on social media and ethics for tomorrow night, and I believe I’ve found a way to sneak in a reference to one of my favorite bands.

My experience with my office’s snack cache is suggesting the uncomfortable possibility that protein bars are their own state of matter.

I can appreciate Le Carré’s shocking twists over and over—because he is also good at the inevitable-but-gripping and because he uses them both to create compelling tragedy.

Highlight of the morning: Hearing a translator for the interviewee on a France Culture show about comics struggle to remember the French neologism for “spoiler.”

Quick thought post-Mando and pre-TRoS: What Star Wars has given me a world in which to tell stories—not just movies. I played RPG campaigns that made the prequel trilogy look good, because the world held up even when the movies didn’t.

It must be called two-factor authentication because the app never works the first time.

I have just learned that there is an Etsy shop dedicated ENTIRELY to producing and selling magnets in the shape of trains and subway cars, and it’s restoring some faith in the internet.

A personal philosophy that I need reminding of today: To make fun of others’ typos or grammatical errors (whatever criticism they otherwise deserve) is nearly always a flaunting of privilege and therefore unnecessary.

Maybe the Cylons were a prescient metaphor for all that is terrible about the Internet of Things, and we ought to be adopting the Colonies’ aversion to networked technologies.

Currently completing my annual review, which has me thinking how much of my career I owe to more senior academics who have been kind and generous to me when they didn’t have to be. Hope I can follow that example myself.

If only I had known as a middle schooler who was uncool for not knowing who Eminem was that one day I would be explaining a “Real Slim Shady” joke in an academic research paper about how Mormons use Twitter 😂🤷🏼‍♂️

My dual monitor setup relies on my using my standing desk. Since I’m under the weather today, I’m working from a chair instead and trying out the new Sidecar functionality for my iPad. Pleased with it so far!